Kingdom Sorts
by goldcoinz19
Summary: An M-rated adventure about a schizophrenic psycho called Xemnas... AU Crack. Contains Bloodhound Lyrics, death, tirades, coifs, wars, homoerotic subtext somewhere, movie references. Cleaned up. The deadbeats will continue whether or not morale improves...
1. Chapter 1

Disclaiming things: I could say I own this, but that would make you think I was a crazy person. 0.0

So I don't own these characters. Hell, I don't even own some of these lines.

My dignity. I threw that in a wood chipper a while ago.

****

The (this isn't even a prologue, is it? More like a random gurgle from the foaming mouth of a mental patient.)

__

A Small Village--Norwich Teasdale Brunswick Bruxville Cheddar Cheas England

Our date is very much irrelevant to the story, wherefore upon something largely world-altering and veritably inuring to the fundamental wellbeing of a well-run society…

…Was not going to occur.

A man, dressed in naught. The naught was some kind of textile around his body. It was absurdly detailed. He carried what appeared to be a purple phallic symbol.

Or gun. Or crossbow. Some article with which he intended to shoot someone.

He was accompanied by a young man in similar clothing. He had with him…a guitar. Not a guitar. A guilles-tar. (It sits heavily on the mind mind that this description could be wrong.)

This is a pun.

They didn't seem to be heading anywhere. More like, they were traveling in some rigged or debauched scene structured around something they'd seen in a movie, more than likely, and were attempting to reenact.

Let's observe. A high wall, which is a setting.

Of course, this is a Checkov's gun. Something lurks behind that wall.

That something is an old woman.

And now for something completely violent.

"Fascist!!" Cried the be-hatted lady, who wore baby blue, a color that didn't suit her, not at all.

The man addressed, a popular video game character, spun around. His golden eye, which was either the result of nefarious intent or some pure evil that is left completely unexplained, or in some manner a reference to the eagle-eyed assassin of Bond fame, widened in ostensible horror as the old gremlin of a woman and her pointy hat flopped onto the wall and aimed a piece of willow wood chipped into a pointy rod at the trunk of his body.

That ostensible horror quickly turned to fury, as ice melts on an oven top, and he aimed his phallic thingamagig, only he pointed at her head.

"Hag!" He bellowed. They quickly shot off whatever said unexplained magical energies they possessed at one another. On one hand, the old woman expelled glittery pink, which missed the target completely, in a sense.

It did do what water tends to do to certain fabrics marketed by Mattel.

On the other hand, he shot the poor thing's head completely off, and it landed, like a charred, withered and quite depressed pumpkin, in a Harry Carry plop into a haystack, with Olympic form that was overall not very dignified, and certainly didn't earn her even a measly five points.

The gunman's companion nodded, in a sort of slowly arrived at approval.

"Yeah, muthafucka." He said.

In powder blue, the man with the purple phallic object grunted. It was very manly.

KINGDOM SORTS

Prepare for all you hold Dear to Bleed Out of Your Ears

Ch. 1, or WTF (muthafucka exclamation point)

The arroyo was orange, the dust sweeping idly like some massive gentleman with a broom and arthritis and possibly a limp, across the dry, dry, very dry dust. Yes, dust swept across dust. Such is the deep metaphorical toxin entering your limbic system. You will concur in a minute.

The car was white, rust tinged. A convertible. The car adjacent to it was black. Possibly a sedan.

Actually, it was nothing even remotely like that. In all true horror, it was a PT Cruiser. Matte black finish, but not homological to the country.

The silence within was punctured by the sounds of gunfire. Not within the PT Cruiser however, but within the saloon-resembling church that stood beside the PT Cruiser. They were probably in Texas, as there was a saloon-resembling church.

The floorboards of the front entrance to the saloon-cum-church had creaked as snakeskin boots passed over them only moments before.

"You think I'm…sadistic, don't you?" The floorboards within the church squeaked under the weight of the snakeskin toe. The boot wearer's accompanying robes seemed a bit out of place, unless the padre had decided that honky tonk was more than appropriate for a wedding in potentially Texas.

The figure was limned by the darkness, but his face, oh his face, was ANON.

Below him lay a figure in a white wedding gown scarlet tinged, and Jenova tinged…with blood. White hair curled in the heat and the floorboards. It was as if a Kabuki actor had been shot repeatedly in Sarah's dress from Labyrinth, goblins refusing to attend her wedding because she didn't play 'Dance, Magic Dance' down the aisle.

The man above the languishing, possibly dying kabuki actor shifted his weight. He held a colt in one hand, his fingers so terribly close to his obscured face, as if contemplating what he had done, or, more importantly, trying not to shoot himself while contemplating this.

On the ground the bride, or bridal kabuki actor, whichever works for you, coughed scarlet gobs of blood. A very wet cough, like a cat eructating a hairball.

The gunman knelt beside her, cocking his head to the side. In silhouetted profile, he did kind of look like David Bowie.

"Honestly, this is me at my most…" The gun barrel came to the bride's unseen temple. Or kabuki actor's. The jury was hung on this one. But we didn't do it. We swear.

"Masochistic." He uttered, oh so dramatically. He puckered his lips. "Blam."

In the background, organ music carried over the tableau, and slowly, solemnly, in respect for the not-near-deceased-but-getting-there, the robed figure stood again, head bowed, looking a tad guiltily to the side.

He swallowed tearfully. Another figure began to sing. It was very moving, very tear-inducing.

"Let me go onn…like a Twister in the Sun/Let me go ooonnn/Big hands I know you're the…" The sharp report of a pistol firing into the singer's frontal lobe interrupted the dulcet music.

Crying, biting his lip to hold it back, the robed man in the cowboy boots turned around.

"Why'd you go and interrupt the stylings of popular singer Axel Rose?" The murderer whined, face scrunching up childishly.

The man holding the violet-hued phallic symbol, who might be of some remembrance to you, or holding a "remembrance day parade for old age pensioners", as the adage goes, no medals taken out and polished, not even metaphorically, waved his gun around a bit dramatically and commenced scolding.

"Firstly," he growled. "He is not Axel Rose. He's just Axel." Finger pointing at the ruined, freshly made cadaver, he flashed his hand before his face, constructing out of it a peace sign that was not so peaceful.

"Secondly," he hissed. "That song isn't even BY Axel Rose! I don't even know who it's by!"

"Thirdly," he turned his fingers into a trident of death, then waved his arms around the room as if frantically rowing for Ben Hur. "You don't even KNOW these people!"

"So how the FUCK can you possibly be MASOCHISTIC? Ya freakin' sadist!"

Lip trembling, the man with the gun decided to reflect on that. After a moment of long soul searching, he sniffed, and came to a conclusion.

"Xigbar, we did meet them in the grocery store, and they made fun of me."

It was only a few hours before. The shop in question was a supermarket as the term is generally recognized in the day of this chronicler. Only this shop, unlike most supermarkets, was located in a fantasy universe, and was something that fantasy universes so surprisingly lack. Fantasy universes are unfortunately well behind the modern commercial scene. It is a tragedy that every mother of five brave sons must encounter when she's looking for the milk to make the cookies that will feed her children and let them grow strong enough to encounter that dragon and vanquish it. Because no supermarkets exist, this mother must suffer children with weak bones who are unable to vanquish dragons and must sacrifice four of her five young sons to the tragedy of narrative causality.

Because there are no supermarkets. You might well do to reflect on that.

A white haired, tall drink of water was standing in line, dressed in a wholesome sweater and a handsome kilt skirt with knee high socks banded with pinkim flower pink, and fancy silk bows tied in the long tresses of his hair. He was a well tanned, handsome fellow, very leggy.

Beside him stood his attractive mum. Her apron was blue with yellow polka dots and a ruffle around it and a pocket for shoplifting meat products. Her hair was long, black, faded in strands, her face scarred by daddy's domestic abuse, and her own war campaigns in faraway lands. She covered it well with an eye patch, because she was not a sissy kind of mommy who would disguise such things with makeup. Oh no.

"Now Xemnas, dear. Only one candy bar when we get to the checkout line." She advised, smiling prettily, however thinly she did. A smile most women her age use to confront things such as diapers and puppy-produced stains.

"Why, mommy?" Xemnas whined, twisting his back into a question mark. His big gold eyes were owlish under his white as snow bangs.

"Because you'll be fat," She said sweetly, clawing a jar of pickles off the metal shelf. "You'll be a fat, fat cow."

Mommy pushed the cart away sharply. Xemnas' mouth opened, in hurt surprise, eyebrows scrunching up over his nose. A nearby boy toyed with a plastic transformer.

You know that kid in class? The one you all hated. Crew cut, buck teeth, Down's syndrome face. Clearly inbred, even if you did have to fish around for the evidence.

That was this child, and he was playing 'airplane' with a transformer. At first it was the toy…but no. It was a real transformer, the thing that provides power to the building.

As stated before: inbred.

The power did go out to the building. Mommy let out a grunt of 'dagnabbit', and punched someone.

"Haha," Said the biological mistake. "Mommy said you'd get fat."

"Shaddup, Demyx. You cut the power to the building. Stupid head." Demyx started pouting like that Mikey child from that cereal commercial you no longer remember.

"Am not!" He crowed.

"Stupid head! Stupid head! Stupid head!" Xemnas chanted.

"Wehhhhhh!" Demyx blared. Mommy was having none of that.

"Shut up both of you! I mean, if you don't cut that out, I'll pour extra Crisco on your burn wounds! Anyway I won't do it in public, so as not to call attention to the abuse, which I will inflict on you once we get back home. Abuse is a problem caused by rage and aggression and generally unfulfilled in life which so happens to be common because people are fueled by anger, and are angry cruel people, who torment others in a cycle which has history of inflicting its worst on the next generation, because people, even--yanno what? Fuck this. We're getting to the point."

"Let's go to the checkout line." Mommy said after catching her breath. The two followed, ashamed. Mommy was so mean sometimes! It's not like it was her temperament or anything, but she got in these alcohol fugues where she'd just kick the crap out of you for not making any sense. No reason, too.

As they entered the line, Xemnas bumped into a woman accidentally. A woman who was dressed like a stripper. Xemnas had never seen a stripper before, but he knew a skanky ass ho when he saw one.

"Wotchwhear yer goin' little girl. How you dare bump ugly with Rosa the Crimson!"

"I didn't dare; I wouldn't dare; and I didn't." Xemnas stammered. He scrunched an eyebrow.

"Isn't Rosa the Crimson fairly redundant?"

"Silence batshit insane one! You chit of girl cannot make it in Deep Ground! You are nowhere big cleavage. Also, you have fat moo."

"She called you fat." Demyx giggled. Xemnas bit his lip, pouted. He was so darn pretty, and all were mean to him.

"Uh, she's calling you out," Said a helpful bystander, in a serious voice, which was very helpful-sounding and very necessary. Sometimes Xemnas needed those hints. He was very thankful that the man made such a useful observation on his behalf. "Are you going to take that?"

"No," he sulked, turning his chin down, looking quite dangerous and pretty. "I'm not."

He snapped his fingers once, twice, thrice, aligning his neck along the bias of the movement. Though sulking, his intimidation factor would have been high. He wished he was participating in a LARP. Then he would have been a schoolgirl with a deadly katana.

"Bring. It. On."

"…And that's how we know them." Xemnas concluded. In wake of his explanation, people were struck by a loss of words.

"I really explains things in detail, don't I?" Xigbar seemed to be adjusting his jaw. He did that rather a bit like Kermit the Frog, but perhaps that was coincidence.

"Yeah. You do. Only one problem with that." Lightning fast, his fingers grabbed onto Xemnas' collar and moved violently, which some would consider not quite the goal of trying to instill a sense of reasoning. Hit by cosmic rays, cosmic leakage from an astral plane that was scientifically disproved of, and generally killed more often than your ordinary brain cell carrying meat packet, Xemnas' brain matter was probably precious little, and therefore exceedingly precious indeed.

"That all happened in YOUR FUCKING HEAD!!" The thunder died off. The spit gobs, however, did not.

Xemnas tried to wink past one.

"Ohhh." Realization dawned. "Okay! So, what does that mean for us?"

Xigbar chewed the inside of his cheek.

"Uh…" Began a voice, high pitched and obviously still innocent of the fluffy rabbit annihilating features of Xigbar's disorderly violent personality. Xigbar crumpled, as all were disposed to do, in the wake of Roxas' mindlessly special specializing in special preciousness. He was that special, he was.

"You know what? Let's just forget it. Get a car, and never look back." He desisted in the wrinkling the lapel of his leader's robe, promptly turned and huffed back toward the bat winged doors.

Crossing the ruined corpse of his comrade; he decided to yell at it.

"Axel! Get the hell up, and stop playing dead like the rest of the corpses!"

"Aw, but I wanted to exploode." Axel pouted. Like an undead marionette he rose, smiling all the while like a concussed piece of French toast with little eggy eyes and a syrup mouth heading toward a plastic receptacle.

"Shut up, or your getting this pole gun thing lodged in places you don't want it to." After a split-second of deliberation he yelled, as if this proved some manner of point, "I'm Goddamned Xigbar!"

Axel shrugged indifferently and turned into Xigbar's path.

Blood spewed out of Axel, going everywhere, and his body fell down like a discarded terry cloth fraggle.

"M'okay." He replied, raising a thumb from the floor.

Exeunt omnes, because they had. Minus the critically injured or dead ones.

Xemnas, Xigbar, Demyx, Axel and Roxas uniformly took the dry and dusty steps, robes swishing, hems getting dusty.

From his vantage point in the PT Cruiser, Saix, sporting sunglasses, gave a faint nod and proceeded to roll down the driver's side window.

"You took your time." Xemnas flailed an arm, lovable mischief maker expression welded on his feline face.

"I wanted to."

En route to a destination unmentioned, though it would not be unfavorable of it to receive littoral utterance on the medium before you, Xigbar, in the passenger seat, leaned over toward Saix to whisper in his elfin ear almost conspiringly. He meant it to be threatening. It came off as somehow erotic to a subset of the fan base.

This is the only mention we will make of the fan base.

"Why a PT Cruiser?" Xigbar groaned. Saix sighed, attempted a one-shoulder shrug.

"I don't know. Perhaps it was because the keys were unavailable on all of the other dismembered corpses you piled waist-high in that parking lot."

Xigbar decided to let that percolate.

"So, why didn't we hotwire that convertible? It was a goddamned Monte Carlo. It would have been better than this." He slumped back in his seat, folding his arms. He waved a hand imperiously. Sat forward.

"I mean, it's a bloody clown car! We could probably have asked Luxord, Lexaeus and the others to pile in!"

"Do I look like a car expert?" Saix wondered coldly.

"You look," Spat Xigbar, holding onto the door for dear life, or with deadly menace. "Like a friggin' Vulcan."

"And you…" Saix paused for a second thoughtfully. "…Look like Seagall."

Xigbar looked as if he had tasted the bitter sheath of the betel nut.

"That was low, man! That…was low." Lower lip flattened into a liver-shaded roll of flesh, Xigbar sunk further into the slightly concave tan of the polyester seat cushioning. He kicked one of his skinny legs.

"Xaldin told you to say that, didn't he?"

"Ha-Ha! Well now we call this the act of mating…" A look of apprehension crossed Xigbar's massive, vaguely fire ax-shaped head.

"Oh, hell no." He sneered. Fingers pointing outward and moving spasmodically, Axel bounced around in his seat to the limits of seatbelt asphyxiation. He knew all of the words. He invariably knew all of the words.

"Sweat baby, sweat baby, sex is a Texas drought/Me and you do the kind of stuff that only Prince would sing about."

"Christ. Why?" Xigbar shrieked, hands balling, teeth combing the Cruiser's clean air in anguish. "I mean, WHY?"

"I don't know. He's a troglodyte?" Saix offered darkly, driving robotically as he would the many leagues on.

Axel threw one hand into the air after the other, blissfully oblivious.

"Yes I'm Siskel yes I'm Ebert and you're getting two thumbs up/You've had enough of two hand touch you want it rough you're out of bounds/I want you smothered want you covered like my Waffle House hash browns…" Swinging back and forth from the shoulders up, he truly resembled a fraggle. A sexy, sexy fraggle, with a ludicrous fetish for boys who would complete his Axel Rose paradigm.

Roxas was special, yes. Special to Axel particularly, who wanted them to be special friends.

"Would you cut that the hell out? Please!" Xigbar screamed.

"You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals/So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel…"

"…I swear to God I'm warning you…" The gritted teeth of the sentence seemed to bite every last molecule of air in the car.

"Do it again now!/You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals/So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel…"

"I'm not kidding!" He lunged for Saix's claymore, which rested between the two seats like a frilly prop out of a sparkling unicorn fantasy piece. "You see this?"

Directing Axel's attention to the two-handed saber rattling was a futile endeavor.

"Love the kind you clean up with a mop and bucket/Like the lost catacombs of Egypt only God knows where we stuck it--"

Xigbar manically rattled the sword against the console, and Saix's eyes retroactively turned toward the motion.

"--Hey that's--"

A sound like a guillotine slicing through cabbages, and a rouge spatter that covered much of a window.

"Hey-what-was-that?" Roxas stammered. Something had hit the hatch dully, rolled around a bit, and was a dark spot from where he crouched below it.

"It's cherry syrup." Xemnas announced gleefully, smile tainting his lips. He was lost in admiration for the 'portrait of a bloodbath in scarlet and slight yellow' that had been painted all over him and the window.

"Um. What was that bump? What's this red stuff?" Roxas carried on. It was shock, surely, disbelief, perhaps, that induced this.

"Ketchup." Xemnas was sing-song happy about it, telling of the mid-afternoon cartoon programming he liked to watch.

He ran one long, surgically ideal finger down the window smear, in awe of the creativity of mankind.

"Hey, check out this silly putty." Demyx announced, juggling something that might have been once part of Axel's esophagus.

"Whooh."

Kneading the gelatinous mess in his fingers, he blinked dully, and looked around. Evidence sitting right beside him notwithstanding.

"Hey. Who turned off the awesome music?"

Xigbar leaned conspicuously on the console, blood dripping off the end of the claymore he still held in hand.

"I DID." He sneered. "And hopefully? I did it FOREVER."

"You know, that was harsh. And that was my blade." Saix sighed. Xigbar's eye revolved, like a loose plastic eye with a jiggling pupil, sighting and taking in the weapon in his hand.

"Oh."

"You're cleaning it off." An unstated, 'shoot me' was implied, but Saix was judicious enough to know that one of them would have done just that.

Roxas was not very happy. He was in an undisclosed location, yes, previously disclosed, underneath the cover of the hatch, which was not the same thing as the trunk. There was a gap there for air, but he had to crouch.

Something warm and sticky was dripping onto him, and as he felt the road shift beneath the car's bed, so too did a weight shift above him.

It rolled slightly to the right, exposing a Dan Brown book cover rendition of the Mona Lisa, only with Axel representing the enigmatic lady, his hair askew; the scene below the hatch being more something along the lines of a child looking up through the floorboards at something too awful to name, almost directly copying a Tim Burton movie.

"Hey, Axel's…oh, oh my GOD. His eyes. His eyes are looking at me."

Saix and Xigbar traded accusatory glances.

"That's just sick!" Roxas wailed. "Sick, sick sick!"

"Yeah. You know what also is sick in the head? Our leader. This would've NEVER HAPPENED if we didn't have to pick up his pills!" Xigbar shouted in reply. He rearranged his rear end, collapsing deep into the seat.

Xemnas held the medication directly in front of his face. He shook his orange cylinder of pills like a maraca, going cross-eyed.

"My hippocampus grew three sizes this day."

"Keep telling yourself that." Saix shot aside to Xigbar, who promptly hit the seat, the dashboard, and the window with his fist.

"Are you saying I fly off the handle?" He sputtered. The flurry of his arms was like snow falling on a television set in time-lapse.

"Oh no," Saix assured him thinly, arching his brows. "Decapitating Axel for singing a song you didn't like--"

"People who sing that song…they have it COMING." Xigbar rasped. He held up a finger. One trembling finger.

"Dude; eat your bran flakes." Demyx inputted. He wobbled the esophagus like a slinky. "Woah. Jelly."

"Is that his blood?" Roxas panted.

"His blood is leaking on my uniform! My uniform! It's seeping through!"

Roxas hit the hatch accidentally in his attempt to escape.

"Well, he always did want to get his bodily fluids on you, Roxas." Xigbar told him sarcastically, in his driest, nastiest voice. Saix looked aside at him, eyes harboring librarian-level stern disapproval.

"Oh God that's not--" Roxas gulped. He was unable to finish that sentence, Axel's jaw taking that moment to puppet like a ventriloquist dummy.

"Get horny now." The hatch rocked several times with Roxas.

"Waaaaaaaaaaaeeeeeeeeeh!"

End Chapter One. Next Chapter: No Need for Churritos--Tonight we Dine in Hell!


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Do not own the characters, but now you have less movie dialogue for the price of more ear-bleeding mayhem!

CHAPTER TWO

List a number between four and seven and you don't have too many avenues. Much could be the same said of Xemnas' sanity.

The car hummed and the engine dropped off suddenly. The collective reasoning of the group was that stopping the car at gradual deceleration would prevent them from going through the building.

"Nice. Very circumspect."

"Shut it." Xigbar twisted the already conflicting furrows of his face, gripped the handle of the door and tried to wrench it off. The desired effect was opening the door; since the handle came off in his hand, this was not achieved.

"Shit-shit-muther-ass-masturbation-fuck-shit-fuck--"

"Are you quite done?" Saix queried wearily.

"Go fuck a KLINGON!" Xigbar hollered back, almost cheerfully. He removed his phallic weapon from whatever plane of existence it typically inhabited in that small span of time when he wasn't using it, aimed it summarily at the door, and fired.

The door landed on a car parked about eighteen feet away with a rabbit squeal of metal.

"Great. How are we supposed to explain that?"

Xigbar stated long at the intumescing metal. The alarm on the car had sounded once and died.

"We'll get their insurance later."

Saix shrugged, opened his door with a tinge more decorum, and moved around to the side to collect Demyx. Child safety locks were necessary, and the door had fortunately come equipped.

"Oh man; zoo time!" Demyx fumbled anxiously with his seatbelt. Saix sighed, leaned over and unattached the seatbelt that lashed Demyx to his seat, working it over Demyx's head and detangling it from the subordinate's wrists.

"No, this is not a zoo, Demyx." As the younger member of the organization crawled out, Axel's body slumped over to claim the space.

Xemnas looked at it as if hypnotized and gave it a little poke.

"Get out, you bastard. We're getting food." Xigbar held the door in his hands. He quickly dumped it on the parking lot's asphalt.

Xemnas twisted his head around, orb-eyed, expression faintly concussed.

"That was the door." He observed, smiling like a vampiric drag queen on ecstasy.

"I KNOW." Xigbar pronounced. He snatched Xemnas by the arm, pulling him from the remains of the car. The seatbelt screamed under the friction, and eventually came undone after it tore.

Xemnas gave him a friendly pat on both shoulders, as if in approval.

"Your violence knows no bounds, O Great One."

"Shut up and get your ass in gear." He tilted his head up, shouting over the damaged car. "Demyx! Get Axel's head and Roxas from out of the hatch!"

"Dude; I'm on it." Demyx bobbed his head, laughing. "Like stink on a fly." He wove toward the hatch, inserting the key while humming a little song he'd made up on that winged insect.

The hatch flipped up, nearly knocking him flat. He peered in, apparently failing to see the blood smears and severed head that respectively covered the tan upholstery and a particularly pointy-edged and reddish corner to his left.

"Roxas?" He wondered into the expanse. The hatch did have a lot of space.

"Mup-mip-mmm-m-mup…" Something answered in a tiny whimper. Demyx twisted his head like a macaw, grabbed the partition on the hatch and threw it up. Due to Axel's head being in the way, it flopped back down, covering the hunched figure of Roxas, who had a darkish trickle of something down one side of his face.

Xemnas trotted over and took up station beside Demyx eagerly, grabbing the partition in both hands.

"It's…Easter!" He threw it up, holding it there despite the pressure of Axel's head on the hinge.

Roxas resembled a mannequin for a moment, one that looked in as much immediate peril as if it was about to be crushed by an eighteen wheeler. He returned to sputtering, rocking back and forth and threading his fingers through his mouth.

"That's a mark of blood." Xemnas observed, eyes psychotically bright. "He hast been ah-noin-tid."

"Would you cut that out and just grab the kid and go?" Xigbar yelled, waving a fist. "I'm starving; let's get a move on!"

Xxx-Xaldin's free day

The alarm clock chimed the recorded sounds of a Manchester Cathedral and came to a stop on the fluttering of birds' wings and simulated pigeon coos. A beefy finger pressed a little black switch and a man groaned slightly against the fluffy blue economy pillow covered in a tiger lily pillow slip.

A dreadlock had wound up in his eye as he slept. Blinking it free, he wiped the smear of drool from his face and sat upright, pushing the last of his Transformers print comforter away from him. Body bare, save for a pair of heart print boxers and a t-shirt commemorating the Adventures of Jackie Chan cartoon.

He pushed the cotton aside to scratch at his tawny, muscular stomach, puckered his face a bit like an orangutan and blew a raspberry.

He rolled his shoulders back, lifted the clock, which was of some QVC extraction, and peered at the round plastic surface and the curliques of the hands within.

"Pfft. Two already." He smirked, scratched absently at his dreadlocks, fingers meandering to his sideburns. It was a very self-satisfied smirk.

"No Stephen Seagall today so far. Life is good." He got up, set the clock down and wound his way through the neatly stacked magazines and fluffy stuffed animals with comical faces that scattered the floor.

This was, he reflected, truly the apartment of a lonely Asian businessman. His foot kicked idly at a fluffy gorilla with blue fur, which landed after a tumble on his neatly bundled bag of laundry. He clapped his hands and a soft light came on overhead, accompanied by bird sounds.

He smiled, barely containing his joie de vivre.

"Ah. Truly this is my fortress of solitude." He made his way to his magazine rack, which sat beside his nightstand. On the nightstand rested a Jungle Book lamp, which he switched on by way of a jelly star pull, pink and sparkly.

He lifted up and read a small yellow post it note from the rack, fetching a pencil as he did.

The to-do list read:

No Stephen Seagall

Do laundry

Catch Ben Ten marathon (I love this show. Gwen will be hot.)

Watch new filler arc of Naruto

Golf

Go on Youtube; catch Lonelygirl115 soap of the week

Play ukulele from primer no. 3 (Song of grass)

Feed the squirrels

Call mom

Write tomorrow's to-do list

He hummed a blue mountain card jingle to himself and ceremoniously laid the paper down on the nightstand, where he wrote, in careful block letters 'halleluiah' beside the 'No Stephen Seagall' and checked the box just to the left side of that.

After some thought, he added a smiley face.

After a little more thought, he tried to draw some confetti, but the tip of his pencil broke.

Xxx-They Dine in Hell

After some considerable effort with gorilla glue (kept on Saix's person for the eventuality), Axel sat at the table, menu in hand. He grinned like a Cheshire cat behind the menu, resembling a maniacal dungeon master in his turn as well.

Xigbar sat across from him, wishing, from the look on his face, that he would ingest defecation and expire. Of course, this was just standard interaction for the two of them.

Roxas was there, at least in body. Demyx was there in body too, but his frame of mind was unflappably unaffected by the events of Axel's repeated demise, or even occupying the restaurant.

Xemnas was trying to remove the lid on his psychoactive medication.

"It says child proof," He announced in a drawl, putting his elbows into the twist. "And yet…I am a man." He cupped the fingers of one hand philosophically, holding the inviolable vial in the other.

"I am a man. I am a man. It is a man." He shook the bottle like Nikita Krushev's shoe; for emphasis.

"Give me that." Xigbar reached over the corner of the table and snatched the bottle from Xemnas' slightly resisting hands. After popping the top off, he returned it.

"No--damn it! I just wanted a quiet meal!" He grabbed Xemnas' arms, and Xemnas stopped trying to drink his medication. He closed his mouth, turned his eyes to Xigbar dejectedly.

"But…I need them…to think." He whined, eyes beginning to go damp around the edges.

"Goddamn it, if you start crying--gah! All I wanted was a quiet meal!" Xigbar pulled away from Xemnas, looking around the table in squinty-eyed malevolence.

"I hate all of you." At exactly this moment, a pretty, stereotypically anime waitress appeared, name not fitting her in the least.

Let us describe our waitress. She was wasp-waisted, with breasts like ripe mangoes carefully tucked inside her little white blouse. Hers was a miniskirt, which revealed more than it should have of her defined, coltish legs. Her hair was back in a well-worn bun, as if she had been delivering service for much of the day. A blonde, with shimmering eyes.

"Hi!" She said brightly, in a twang that in no universe could possibly have existed. "M'name's Joey. 'll be ya servah to-die."

"You will?" Saix wondered flatly, barely looking up. The statement was purely an ironic one.

"…Yeah." Xigbar's teeth were hugging the air he breathed for dear life. His fingernails were wearing through his gloves as they tried to dig into the marbled Formica surface of the table.

"Sah," Xigbar's face twisted as if willed to as she said this blithely, "Waddya awl wanna do?"

"You exactly." Axel murmured with a dainty grin, setting his menu down. The waitress pulled her bosom up by some invisible cord and blinked.

"Ex-use mae?"

"Use you." Axel sniggered. "How I'd like to."

"Axel STOP. I swear to god. Or whatever machinations brought you into this world, will not be enough to SAVE y--"

"Yeah, I'd like some milk." Axel told her with an oily grin. To Xigbar he mouthed a few words, to make him purple in anger.

"From her Ample Breasts!"

"I would like water." Saix sighed deeply. He had managed to check Xigbar's foot with his leg, preventing him from leaping up at an inopportune moment and blasting Axel in the face.

He looked over to the pale, trembling Roxas.

"He'll have a fruit punch…I guess."

The waitress smacked her gum at him. "Alrady." Her bosom swiveled so that it pointed at Demyx's head.

"An' yah?"

"I'll have a Fresca." He said immediately, placing his hands on his knees. Smacking her lips, the waitress pouted, the puckering of her lips meant, on some wavelength, to mean more.

"Whey done haave Fresca." Demyx aimed his fingers at her and smiled reassuringly.

"Dr. Pepper then." She gave him another pitying look, shaking her head of tousled curls ever so slowly.

"Uh," he raised an eyebrow. "Seven Up?"

"Naw," The hypnotized waitress told him.

"Hi-C lemonade?"

"Naw."

"Grape soda?"

"Naw." The waitress was swaying her hips, agitated. Behind her, Axel was framing the scene, tongue crooked in the side of his mouth.

"Uh…" Demyx looked like a man undergoing an existential crisis. He grasped at the table as if grasping at straws.

"You do have root beer, don't you?"

"We got some Barq's."

"Cool." He smiled automatically, pointing at her. "I'll have that." She smiled back and chuckled. Unaware of why she was chuckling, he threw his head back and laughed out loud.

Xigbar began tapping his foot.

"I'll have a coke." He told her through gritted teeth, and pointed at Xemnas. "Order. Now."

"Cherry iced tea. Whoo, no? It is chez refined." Xemnas, being Xemnas, smiled prettily to himself and began twirling a moustache he did not have.

"Okaye, dear." Spoke the waitress, obviously using her limited reasoning to speak softly in recognition of a confused maniac. She wrote their orders down at a typewriter twitch of her pencil.

"Awl bee raht bake." She told them, and whisked away like the frightened young thing that she was.

"Mm. Wonder what she's baking in that easy bake oven." Axel was watching her skirt away fondly, propping his hands up on his elbows, which were breaching etiquette.

"Elbows off the TABLE you GODDAMNED FUCKING FUCK--" Saix smoothly reached over and pinched a nerve in Xigbar's shoulder.

Xigbar's head hit the table at mach three. The collective stared.

Eyes batting heavily, lips pressed together like those of a woman scorned, Axel leveled his eyes at the graying ponytail and the tight, filigree pull of the hair across the scalp of Xigbar's head. Hands moving casually, smiling an elegant smile, he removed a fork from the sleeve of napkin it came in and leaned over the table to poke Xigbar lightly a few times in the head.

"Demyx?" He called sweetly, twisting his head around to look at his companion diner. "Should I twirl his hair up in it, like spaghetti?"

"Axel," Saix groaned.

"Axel," Axel said musically, turning his wrist a little into Xigbar's scalp. "Always gets his just desserts."

"You do." Demyx giggled.

"Hey; did I order tea?" Xemnas patted his robes down as if looking for his keys. "I wanted a root beer float."

"Check, please." Saix muttered beneath his breath. It was just that moment that Xigbar chose to grip the fork and wrest it from the weak grip of Axel's hand.

"I…HAVEN'T EATEN." Xigbar growled, climbing to his elbows, fork at the ready.

"Ooh." Axel moved his head like a turkey, fingers crooking toward Xigbar's table-occupying form. "Spicy meatball."

With a blood-curdling growl Xigbar launched himself up and, with an overhand strike, buried the fork into Axel. Roxas, seated beside Axel, started to keen.

"Weeeeaaaaaaaah!!" Axel fell back with a smirk, spouting blood.

"I don't really want tea; Demyx, switch with me." Despite the spectacle between Xigbar and Axel, in which Saix was struggling to keep the end of Xigbar's ponytail in grip, Demyx looked at his leader, mouth forming an o of surprise. He shrank back defensively.

"Naw, man. It's my root beer." Xemnas raised his head, eyes toward the ceiling, and thought about this.

"Switch?" His eyes were puppet-large. He drew his words out for their fullest effect.

"Noooo?" Demyx mocked, hugging the table top, bumping into the edge of Axel's hip. He blinked as blood rained like a sprinkler on the left side of him.

Xemnas' eyes flashed imperiously, murderous rage breaking the surface as a barracuda gleams beneath the water for a brief moment before snapping onto your calf.

"I said, switch with me!" Xemnas screeched, going red in the face. He stamped his foot, glaring at Demyx.

"Switch with him, damn it, or I'll start using the butter knives." Xigbar pronounced.

"Aw. You always let him have his way." Demyx sulked. Xemnas drew up beside the still standing Xigbar, wrapping his arms around his waist and propping his head on his shoulder.

"That's because mommy loves me more."

Xigbar turned ever so slowly toward Xemnas, building his fury.

"If you do this again." He began icily, placing his palm on Xemnas' face and pushing him harshly back into his chair, "I will take your happy pills and cram them so far up your ass…YOU'LL BE SANE FOR ALL FUCKING ETERNITY."

"That would be nice." Xemnas mused, but very quietly.

"You know, the human body is eighty percent water."

"WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST SAY?"

Xxx-It is

It was packaged in a very large crate, although the crate was cardboard, and shipping had specified that it probably shouldn't get wet.

The people who had decided to ship the crate were very much the kind of people who thought 'Fragile' was something in Italian.

"Who sent it?" Larxene wondered, toweling off her cropped blonde hair. Marluxia shrugged, watching Luxord circumambulate the crate like it was a cheap variation on the kaabah.

"Well," Luxord said aloud for the lot of them. He was very good at making decisions. "We should probably open it up and see for ourselves what's within."

"You sure?" Zexion held the shipping papers he'd signed a bit earlier in his hands. "I mean, there's no return address and it's awfully large and I doubt it's some posh doomsday device with which we can rule the universe."

"And--that's why I'm the fellow with the beard, and you're the wet little indecisive lad with the emo hair." Luxord's beard was brushed sagely in evidence of his obvious charisma.

"What does that have to do with anything?" Zexion giggled nervously. "I've been in this organization longer than you. I have seniority. You," He leveled his paint brush of emo hair at Luxord as if cocking a trigger on a wet, indecisive gun. "Have to do what I say."

Luxord shrugged dismissively.

"Sure, whatever." His hands started to pry at the holes in the box.

Zexion attempted to mouth something clever for a moment. His eyebrows twitched. His mouth moved like Kermit the Frog's.

"That…That's not doing what I say!" He whined.

"Yes, but should I have to listen to you? I mean, you're eighteen. Age before emo."

Zexion clenched and unclenched his hands.

"I'm not going to stand for this." He stated hotly.

"Well, if you must sit down…" The cardboard box started to give. "There we go."

"You know; you're being kinda mean." Marluxia droned. Zexion flushed gratefully and raised his hands to Marluxia, who stared back at him a shade uncomfortably.

"Thank you! Thank you Marxime!" Zexion laughed, turning like an angry puppy on Luxord's heel. His fingers fell limp when Larxene made a small clicking noise by way of reply.

"Uh, it's Marluxia? Gawd." Out of the corner of his sheepish eye, he caught Marluxia, in all her tall glory, revolving her eyes upward. Imitating a stroke? Hardly.

"Tch. You are so…emo." She said it breathlessly, in obvious disdain.

Zexion dropped to the floor, hugging his knees.

"Open the damn box." He moaned. Luxord turned to him with a cattish grin, remnants of the box in his hands.

"Waay ahead of you, emo lad." He tore what remained of the box away.

It glistened, in a tan plastic sort of way. A large, squarish object, center open, like a computer simulation of a notochord.

Larxene's expression turned rattish. Marluxia puckered her lips.

"Gawd. It's like an ug-ly, gaw-dy…baaaaax." She looked around the foyer of the Castle Oblivion, as if willing a sender to materialize. "I mean, who would send us something like this?" She turned around full circle where she stood, obviously irritated.

Larxene shot the 'box' a shrewish, hateful glare.

"I hate it already." She threw the towel in her hands at it. It missed by several feet, hitting Zexion upside the head.

Or, at least, he liked to think she was aiming at the machine and not him.

Luxord stood before it, knuckles on his hips. He spied Vexen shuffling through, and nodded to him.

"Hoy, there." Luxord nodded at the anonymous box. "What d'you make of this?"

Vexen turned his hatchet face toward it curiously, a light bulb evidently going off, from the sudden, goblin delight that registered.

"That's easy." He told Luxord primly, bringing his hands together in a classically super villain scientist manner. Somehow, his shuffling brought him drifting through the foyer and right up to the machine itself, although it seemed like his legs had failed to intervene.

Luxord lost his ability to receive what the scientist was about to expound.

"That's just creepy."

"What is?" Vexen inquired angelically.

"That thing you do."

"Thing?"

"With the floor!" Luxord inhaled deeply, staring at the slick tiles. "You know what? Let's just drop it. I don't want to think about it right now."

"So," He breathed, gesturing toward the device. "What's this thing again?" Vexen tilted his head back and smiled. It was the most horrible thing Luxord had ever seen.

"Ahh…yes." Vexen's fingertips played together before he ducked his eyes toward the body of the machine.

"This is a microwave emitter." He said it almost too quickly for Luxord to grasp, and scuttled halfway around the machine, peeping into its cylindrical center. "Yes. This is definitely what it is."

Coasting along the surface of the floor in ways macabre, Vexen settled back alongside Luxord, fingers hidden parochially by his robes.

"What's it do?" Larxene asked sharply. Vexen chuckled deliriously to himself, fingers displayed broadly.

"Gather around, children. Uncle Vexen's got a story to tell." Marluxia revolved her eyes and squinted, following Larxene.

"Overdrama." Zexion, where he sat on the floor, scooted up to Luxord and Vexen, and then buried his head against his kneecaps.

"It all started with the commissioning of a weapon at a company called Wayne Industries. You know," He waved a skinny gloved hand. "That company run by Hugh Hefner's Sean Connery in his Bond years' doppelganger."

Vexen smiled faintly, as if his face was slightly botoxed; looked around at the disinterested faces.

"Well anyway…this here is said commissioned device." He patted it like the crown of a very good pupil. "It's a microwave emitter, kids. Anyone want to guess what it does?"

He twisted his head around in lowered expectation.

"It heats things." Larxene deadpanned. Marluxia looked up, or more accurately, straight across, suddenly attempting to be helpful.

"It refries your carryout?" Vexen looked to Zexion, frowned, and then turned his attention to Luxord.

Luxord scratched his nose in embarrassment. Laughed.

"It boils tea?"

"Wow." Zexion smirked. He suddenly grew very interested in his kneecaps as Luxord attempted to see out of his ear, lips curled in displeasure.

"Okay Vexen, what the heck does it do?" Luxord groaned, shifting his gaze back toward the scientist.

Vexen clapped his hands together gaily with a smile.

"E-exactly. What it does pertains to all of the above in a sense. The periodicity, or wavelength frequency of the emitter excites molecules, particularly water molecules."

"Namely," He continued, petting the top of it. "It evaporates liquid." Vexen moved, in his eerie way, toward a corner of the device opposite Luxord, ducking out of view.

"So, does it work?" Luxord asked exasperatedly.

"Sadly, it was discontinued."

Luxord pinched his fingers together, as if trying to milk the truth from air.

"Why was it discontinued?" Vexen popped up from behind the machine, startling him.

"Gee. I'm so very glad you asked." He stole around it, waving his pointer finger like a wand.

"Human bodies are delicate machines; complex and organic. A human consists of roughly eighty percent H2O."

"Water." Larxene noted. Vexen nodded his head quickly, an excited grin plastered to his face.

"You might go explode if you turn it on." Luxord, slightly disturbed by this, laid his hands on the surface, rubbing at it like a spot that wouldn't scrub out.

"Don't they have some kind of dampening ceramic?" Zexion wondered, from his ball of purple hair and self doubt. Vexen wheeled on him; he might have actually applied the heels of his boots.

"It's not like a damn gun; you don't point and shoot. This machine, basically, cannot shield anything in its radius that is given to evaporation while it's turned on. Which is why there is a slight delay to that, and it's timed to go off on its own."

"Wait; you mean like, right now?" Zexion stammered, eyes bulging through his hair. He rocked, like he was about to put some effort into standing up. "We have to get out of here."

"Quiet, oh emotionally conflicted one." Vexen turned on him a stern eye, which he employed very much like a hand screwing in a light bulb. "This isn't necessary. You see, the activation key is necessary, for one. And there is a small delay. It will unfold like a deadly flower before delivering your death."

Zexion screened his face from view.

"Somehow I knew I wasn't going to like this." He sulked. Luxord let out a grand sigh, like the last bit of air being smushed out of the hull of a ship.

"Zexion; Vexen thinks you're overreacting. I think you're overreacting, and if I ask the girls…Girls?" His eyes wandered to Larxene and Marluxia, two reedy, angry figures staring with dead eyes at their member on the ground.

"Emo."

"Basket case."

Luxord waved a hand.

"See?"

"Gentlemen," He seemed to detach from the wall, almost. Tall, graying, was the man with the goatee. Unknown, but familiar nevertheless, recalling world-class detectives and mad alchemists, Jedi knights, business moguls, sexual psychologists, and Scottish rebels.

A man you'd tirelessly have to describe. His name was, however, Ducard.

"Oh, would you look at that." Vexen announced gleefully, smiling in puzzled, almost geriatric, confusion. "Who is he?"

"It's time to spread the word." The man said to all smoothly. He removed a key from his pocket, and turned it in the transmission for the device. Why they'd let him finesse his way to the emitter, they would never know.

The device hummed and lit up like a small Christmas ornament of death.

"Oh. Oh sh--"

Ducard looked up at them with his mad dark eyes in his satyr-like face, the glow of the machine glinting off the cores of them.

"And the word is: panic."

They did.

Xxx-Home of the Good Burger (According to Axel, at least)

The waitress returned with a lazy Susan larger than the table. Ice clinked in assorted glasses.

"Yawl raddy t'ordah?" She asked them, out of breath. Where he sat, pushing Roxas airtight against the wall, Axel smiled wickedly.

"Any time you'd like." Xigbar shot him a look, eyebrow twitching furiously. It was an expression that yakuza flicks used to indicate a man ready to shove his fist through another man's ribcage. In Xigbar's case, this wasn't much of an exaggeration.

"At least he's showing a healthier interest." Saix stated wryly, taking his proffered glass with a tilt of the head in thanks. He had been bothered by Axel's advances on someone at least seven years his junior, if only because of the extreme youth of the object of desire. Not as bothered as Axel's advances on a ewe, but still quite bothered.

"Fuck no; she's all of fifteen." Xigbar hissed aside, plunking his glass down on the table. "I'd like a cheeseburger, please. Crinkle-cut fries. One of those pickles. Ton of fucking ketchup. You got that?"

"Kay." She sat the drinks down on the table, lifting the fruit punch and sliding it across the surface toward Roxas.

Axel's fingers twitched; Xigbar snarled.

"An' yeh, lil' man?" She inquired of Roxas. The fruit punch moved back and forth thickly, the ice cubes silent. Roxas' eyes bored into its crimson depths.

"Weeaaaaah!"

"He wants the kid's tenders." Xigbar told her quickly, glaring at Saix meaningfully.

"Great job, Vulcan ass. Get him a FRUIT PUNCH." He hissed.

"I'll have the crispy chicken salad." Saix replied, sliding his eyes to Xigbar coldly.

"I was unaware it would cause problems. Do you want to break my kneecaps?"

The tension passed. Saix looked demurely to the side. Xigbar lifted his coke and swigged. He furiously crunched an ice cube, flecks of it shooting off past the waitress as she wrote the orders down.

She looked over to Demyx, a certain unvoiced gleam in her eye. Xemnas nudged him in the ribs, shooting the waitress a paranoid glance.

"She is watching you. Be careful, mein comrade. She seeks your blood."

Demyx looked up at her sleepily, as if seeing her for the first time.

"Ah-oh. I'll have a hot dawg, man, with everything on it." He began to list just what he meant by this, striking each ingredient off on his fingers. "Cheese, onions, chili, relish…"

"Kay."

"Ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise…"

"Kay."

"Barbecue sauce. Ranch dressing." He looked like he was attempting long division in his head for a moment, then smiled luminously. "Tomatoes."

"And yew, swatie?" She pointed the pen, cap forward, at Xemnas' face. Though he had a strong urge to bite the end off, he resisted it. This was class.

"I'll have what the gentleman before me was having." Xemnas told her loftily. "And a root beer float. I'm finished with this one." He shook the empty glass, but she'd turned to look at his dining companion.

Afterward he did wish, until his medication had kicked in, that he'd gnawed that cap to oblivion.

"I wanna float too." Demyx added, giving the waitress another winning smile. She giggled, teeth displayed.

"Squirreled that away fast." Xemnas added by way of complaint.

"Squirrel being the operative word." Xigbar grunted. Their waitress, oblivious, moved her body back into Axel's line of vision, chest sticking out like lure.

"An yuh? Waddya wan naw?" The waitress had waded into deeper waters than she was equipped to handle.

Axel pointedly placed his hand on his chin, and blushed.

"I'll have…hmm." He played with a dining fork that wasn't embedded in him, looked up at his quarry and pointed. "I'll have you, smothered in gravy with a side of your candy ass, okay?"

The waitress went to write this down hurriedly. Paused.

"Pardon?" Axel sniggered, stretched his arms across the table top, and gave her a longing stare.

"Mmm. Let me put it this way. I want the chicken cordon bleu."

"We dan have thed." She told him quickly, apprehensively.

Axel smoothed his fingers across the table, slowly licking his lips.

"I want…the steak tartar."

"Uh…we dan have…whutwasthet?" He stood up from the table, inclining his head coyly. A small smile played on his red, red lips. Half his face, on the right, was red too, and it was not his vermillion hair that made it so. Stuck firmly in his temple was the dining fork, and it glittered softly in the fluorescent light.

"Veal," Axel said dreamily, staring hungrily into her face. "Succulent baby cow."

"Um…" The waitress scrunched up her nose, mouth ajar, horrified. "Yew have a fork inyer hed."

Axel, some would say enthusiastically, gripped the waitress' dainty hand between his gloved fingers.

"Yes, but tonight for us it will be a paradise!"

Their mouths were only inches apart, and Axel was closing. The phallic gun, to Axel's fallacy, popped up from beneath the table. Han Solo to Greedo comparisons could be easily gleaned from this.

Axel's eyes tilted left, but it was far too late to react. The bullet of energy went through Axel's head like cupid's arrow of vengeance.

"Get…horny now." Axel burbled before falling over onto the unoccupied lazy Susan. The Susan, as well as Axel, fell with a sharp clang to the tiled white floor, but not before dragging, with all of the motor function left in Axel, the waitress' tiny, pristine white apron off her hips.

The waitress blinked, and screamed.


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: I do not own these characters. Hehe. Donut.

Disclaimer the Second: Definitely warrants its M Rating this time around. Lots of violence and horror. Really twisted humor. Venture Brothers-style humor. (No worries. No torture. Just…well, remember the last chapter? The one with the microwave emitter?

…Yeah.)

Chapter Three

Xxx-Xaldin's Retreat

Naruto Uzumaki cloned himself repeatedly and struck Kakashi with a myriad of foreheads. Kakashi's hands rose in defense, but it was much too late. His chakra spent, his luck run out…

The screen lit up. "Naruto Uzumaki Wins!"

"Yeah Mom; no Mom; I'm fine." Xaldin absently rolled the right directional stick around with his beefy thumb, telephone poised to his ear and held there with his shoulder blade. His expression, one benignly trance-like, mutated in horror.

"No. Haven't seen him today." He flexed his shoulders, inhaling deeply and moving his tailbone out from underneath his spinal column. He sagged, back into the comfy cushioning of a beanbag he normally kept stuffed in his closet, smiling contentedly.

"Nah. It's my vacation time." The screen inquired if he'd like to play again. He selected 'yes.' Puzzled to himself.

"What do I do there exactly? I'm the HR Director. It pays really nice; I have my own place off the complex."

He selected 'Kidomaru' from the lineup, and sighed dramatically into the phone's receiver.

"No, Mom; I don't work for the mafia. It's a research and development think tank." 'Kidomaru versus random player' was the choice activated. Xaldin paused the game to activate the mute setting. "Yeah. I hire the people who do the thinking."

Under his breath he added nastily, "If that's what you call it."

Kidomaru bounced across the screen, easily fending off Rock Lee with his long range attacks. Xaldin tucked his head in against his shoulder, fingers wildly manipulating the controls.

"Nah. We've got a big meeting with an insurance firm to guarantee a better level of insurance. You know; in case there are accidents." He rolled his eyes with surprising patience in the execution, the bead of color in each cornea moving like a distant satellite across cornea, absorbing the drapery, the ceiling with its glow-in-the-dark stars, the teddy bear made of polyester stuffing and something like the hide of a very dead camel growing faintly more ratty with each passing day in the corner, and the picture of a beautiful, short-haired, wholesome-looking vocalist sitting cross-legged with her head cocked gently to the side on a poster's white backdrop, which was gently stapled to the edge of a bulletin board covered in printout timetables and animated character drawings.

His eyes gently centered back on the game, where Kidomaru was taking irrecoverable damage from Rock Lee's barrage of Taijutsu.

Xaldin scrambled with the buttons in fevered panic.

"Oh, that? No; it's completely work safe, Mom! Stop worrying. I'm a grown man; I can take care of myself."

…So Can They, They Too Often Protest…

"Just fucking great." Xemnas thundered, backed by a ceiling of white, rapidly moving cloud and mixtures of lanthanoid pulses and diffusions to nothing. He revolved a hand at the wrist irritably, and turned to face his motley with condemning honey-wine eyes.

"I mean; I can't leave my crazy ass in any of your hands." He blinked exasperatedly, mouth agape as if to state with pantomime how utterly incredulous this was, so more incredulous than the most incredulous thing a person could possibly submit to a healthily skeptical and analytical doubter.

"You're incompetent douche bags." He added in horrified wonder. He then motioned to Xigbar with one hand, holding his aching forehead with the other, resembling a great mind with ponderous intellect trying to separate the laws of planetary motion, or quantum spin differentials.

"What was with that restaurant we were in?" He cried out, the whites of his eyes bulging like a kabuki actor's. Xemnas nibbled at his fingers; began to pace. "Now I have to figure out excuses for that church or wedding or whatever we went to."

Head bowed and pacing, his hand sprang, finger pointed, in the direction of the black, two-doors-remaining PT Cruiser parked conspicuously on the edge of the vista.

"And we must burn that cruiser. We can't have that lying around the lot with our jackass neighbors."

Xigbar, whom the rant seemed mostly delivered to, took one step forward, hands outstretched, fingers grasping at proverbial straws. His mouth came about level with Saix's ear.

"I hate to step out of line and insult you here, but…" He brought his fists down, the air whistling with the force as he hollered directly into the pointy cone Saix's ear. "Jackass! WHAT FUCKING NEIGHBORS?"

His hands shot out into the expanse of nothing and waved up and down, as if trying to lift the skinny hellion on a fuel tank of Red Bull. He turned about forty-five degrees to the right, eye manic, and made an unpleasant face as he repeated the motion.

He went to turn again, a full ninety degrees leftward, but Saix turned his head and glared at him.

Xemnas, growing ever the more increasingly angry, flung a finger toward the northwestern corner of the spheroid world he'd produced out of a baryon tunnel and a nine-volt battery.

"The goddamned Time Lord that parked his fucking dimension right over there." He hissed between his teeth, in a very low and menacing way.

"HELL with that!" Xigbar reached for his weapon. "Damned Willy Wonka wannabe and his fucking massive phone booth!"

"I really must insist you stay on your property." Boomed a voice from overhead, in a quick, almost nasal effect of Cockney. An ale-dark, gentlemanly Michael Caine voice.

"BURN in HELL, old man!" Xigbar yelled at the sky above him. He aimed at where he thought the general sound was coming from.

Axel moved forward. To borrow a phrase, he was sidling forward. His palms were outturned and only slightly at his sides, his head bent at an extreme angle.

"Yeah boy; see this?" Gesturing toward the dimension next door, he pointed his middle finger heavenward. "Spin on it!"

"We's rulez. El-oh-El." Axel cackled, rotating the finger on its joint. His head erupted in a nebula of blood.

Another pellet of energy tore off Axel's left arm. The offending finger on the right hand kept swiveling awkwardly as the body toppled over.

"Hahaw! You missed!" The Cockney voice booming from a corner of the sky above them was utterly triumphant. Before Xigbar could attempt to rectify that summation, Xemnas clenched his fist and pivoted, coat shuddering as he threw his hand out perpendicular to his subordinates.

An energy beam seared through the PT Cruiser. It promptly exploded in fire, black steel, and not one, but four burning rims moving swiftly out of the blast radius, and then swiftly overhead.

One wheel came rolling back, smoldering, and came to rest at the edge of Xemnas' boot.

"Okay; enough out of all of you! Or else; so help me, amoebas will have more limbs to account for!" He stamped his foot down on the upright wheel.

"I mean; Jesus Christ! And I an Atheist."

He kicked the blackened rim aside with a sneer. Saix, a mere foot outside the path of the beam, sighed, raising a placating hand. He raised another to be on the safe side.

"Look, look; we'll straighten this out when we get inside." His eyebrow flinched; eyes turning warningly aside to Xigbar.

"Vexen can surely conjure something up. You know; mad scientist."

"What's he going to do? CLONE something? That's all he's good for." Xigbar muttered. Saix's left eye started to bug pleadingly.

"Hehe. Maybe he'll make fluffy bunny people to replace all the cut up stuff," Demyx interrupted from his own time and place within the bubble-world. "Hehe. Bunnies."

"Yes," Xigbar said nastily, rolling his eyes and crossing his arms. "Because we all know that Vexen's persuasion is your own…"

Xigbar and Demyx, in the flow of their incompatible wavelengths, began to climb the stairs toward the massive marble door. One, because he was simply that much of a dullard; the other because he was simply that weirded out. Xemnas stewed over their casual approach.

A small cry escaped behind them, forcing the two to stall in their tracks. Xemnas cocked one eyebrow worriedly, and crooked a finger in order to point over their heads.

"Is he going to be okay?" He wondered worriedly, talking over Xigbar and Demyx to Saix.

Saix looked back on the gibbering wreck of a trembling blonde child in a cowl and robe and well out of his mind.

He shrugged.

"Yeah, sure. The kid'll just develop more post-traumatic stress issues with maybe a side of Stockholm Syndrome. After that he should be fine."

Xemnas nodded in comprehension; he went cross-eyed a second later, brow furrowing.

"Let's go inside."

…Inside is now Outside…

Xemnas stared into the foyer. His eyes seemed to disconnect for a moment. He resumed staring.

Closing in on his shoulders, his group ran their eyes down the ceiling and walls, which were more or less decorated by a Jackson Pollock imitator with a serial killer's choice in medium.

"Who the Hell papered my building with corpses?!" Xemnas yelled at the world in general.

Xigbar's face, which was quite enough commentary in and of itself, grew more scrunched and gimlet-eyed as it peered around.

"Ew. Looks like someone turned on a microwave emitter here." He eyed the tan frame of the device sitting in the middle of the foyer with his one and only, ferret like, lifeless eye.

It glowed warmly, perhaps unsurprisingly joyous at the discovery.

"Yep. Yep. There it is. Right in the smack middle of the room." Scars created map lines of glee.

"Hey," Demyx spoke aloud, squinting his eyes as he examined the wall, having retreated there after it vacuously followed their gazes around the eerily silent room.

"Wait," His voice was hushed in a suspenseful way that caused their heads to snap toward him, curious. Except for Roxas, who was giving the wall opposite a thousand-yard stare.

"What is it?" Saix wondered, face grave in expectation of something profound. Demyx rapped on the wall with the knuckles of his hand in three light taps.

"I think," He whispered, in the most sotto of voices. "I might know these corpses."

Xigbar's arms went straight out, knocking into Axel's reanimated corpse, which had followed them in, sans arm and head.

"Ya FUCKING THINK?" His voice boomed and echoed in the chasms of the Castle Oblivion.

Xemnas, knowing commentary from Demyx to be useless (when in the right state of mind, at least), shrugged and inspected the corpses carefully. He strolled over to a body that seemed to be breathing still, genuflected, and carefully lifted it.

The body had bloodily barbequed blue hair.

"Zexion; tell me. What happened here?" Zexion, eyeless, sizzled lightly upon touch.

"We…" Zexion coughed wetly; white vapors wafted off of him, acrid and iron-smelling. "We were on…Schindler's list…"

The energy of stating this too great, or perhaps being a tinge melodramatic, Zexion fell boneless, passed out against Xemnas' arm. He rolled slightly, presumably in an unconscious spasm, so as to have his head hang limply across Xemnas' forearm.

"Mother…is that…"

Xemnas dropped him.

"Ugh." Xigbar commented, looking down at the mangled, steamed shell of what once had been Vexen, whose face was contorted in waxen, boiled-looking horror, and who was not even seeming to breathe. Not at all. He toed the body, backing away from it as it rolled, steaming like a freshly boiled lobster, onto his foot.

"Vexen looks to be in the worst shape."

"Whatever do you…" On the wall behind the balustrade, a shadow flickered. Vexen moved in from the shadows, the lilt of his voice curious.

He looked down from the head of the stairs at the fetal curvature of dead Vexen's spine, and the Edward Munch expression on his eyeless face, politely covering his mouth. "Uck. Oh dear."

Vexen muffled his mouth with both hands, eyes moving back and forth over the other Organization members, the ones who remained upright.

"Why-ever do I keep making clones if you people keep on blowing them up?" He lamented in a small, passive-aggressive voice.

Xigbar put his foot down heavily on the marble intaglio of the floors.

"It isn't our fault this time, you freakish lovechild of Lurch and an owl!" He shook his fist for extra effect. Vexen crumpled self-pityingly somewhere in the hunch of his shoulders.

"Oh, witty comeback, Xigbar," He sulked. "You'd make me cry if I didn't divert all of my tears back into my throat."

"I…hate you." Xigbar snapped angrily, turning away toward the emitter.

"You hate everyone, dear boy." Vexen looked tiredly at the overall living group, and then at the clutch of dismembered members, cold blue flames of his eyes scanning them possessively.

"Oh well. Pay dirt for me." He giggled as he said this. Xemnas, who was examining the machine with an enthusiasm exhibited by the Vexen clone, rose slowly from behind it.

His look was an adamant one.

"No-no. O-nay eriment-expay." He puckered his lips, enunciating each word as clearly as he could, and animated, nay, punctuated each word with his eyebrows as well.

Axel, head returned from the Abyss, feigned interest in the machine at first, and then found actual interest in a badly sunburned, slightly seething something resembling the personage of Larxene, lying helpless in the corner. He pointed at it, a catlike grin breaking the surface of his face.

"Don't worry. I'll take care of this one." He assured the nonchalant room in general as he pranced over to the body.

The body jerked up like an animatronic mummy, planting a knife in the center of his forehead.

"Like Hell, fucker." She moaned. As he writhed on the ground beside her, she expressed her distaste with a slightly painful scrunch of her barely bubbling, still intact eyes. "What's the matter with you? My flesh is boiled. I'm like, living fried chicken."

"Larxene," Xemnas intoned, cocking his head at the sound of her voice.

She looked at him; he smiled a bit sickly.

"You seem a bit better off than the others." He continued to smile, but the lines were growing fainter in one direction and more pronounced in another.

He gritted his teeth to try and remain friendly, walking a doomed man's walk to her side.

"What happened?" Larxene's body tried to rise to Larxene's feet. Coordination blown, she fell back, her body squeaking against the tiles.

Xemnas closed his eyes tightly and smiled as furiously as he could.

"Some jackass with a suit was…agh. Don't touch my skin!" Xemnas pinched tightly, and then opened an eye. Larxene's bloody fingers were twisting a knife into Axel's cerebrum.

"If it's okay with you I'm going to just sit on this." She announced, eyes pronounced balls against the blackish crust on her face.

"Feel free." He almost shouted, voice high, holding his neck as if it was caught in a chin sling.

Larxene's face, on which her skin bubbled and occasionally popped, turned in direction of the trembling Chihuahua form of Roxas, who was covering his face with his cowl and gloves and rocking back and forth.

"What happened to Roxas?" She inquired of Xemnas, eyes popping in fury. A bloody bubble dislodged itself from her nostril, followed by a long, heavy drip of red-black blood.

Xemnas chuckled heartily, nervously, throwing his head back in order to stare only at the relatively pristine ceiling. He raised his palms as he looked back down at her, partly to obscure her from view.

"Don't worry about that right now; we have to patch you people up. We have an important meeting scheduled with Las Noches and we do want their coverage, don't we?"

He turned to those subordinates who were less maimed, among them Vexen, who was toying with his own corpse in a manner Xemnas pretended he wasn't.

Vexen was puppeteering the waxen, white and pink fleshed, bloodless rubbery thing, steaming and white-crusted with its own fat, clothing mostly burnt off of it. Puppeteering it to slap itself. He was having a good smirk of it.

Xemnas swallowed his sick and glared until silence, not the wet sounds of mangled limbs striking one another, was gained.

Larxene hacked and gurgled; Xemnas flinched.

"We need to get this half-assed organization together. I didn't sell my soul…"

("Oh god; here he goes." Xigbar whispered aside to Saix, putting his hand to his face as he rolled his one eye.)

"…To the Devil, double-cross my master, and sacrifice millions of lives just so that I could look like a jackass with my pants down in front of my peers." Xemnas whisked back and forth like a murderous metronome.

Roxas screeched like a monkey in agony; Xemnas blinked and twitched. He raised his hand and chopped it violently across an open palm. With that, he turned his back to them and glided toward the staircase.

"You all need to be on duty by next week. I'm going to my office; I'm going to place my medication within reach this time, and you're all going to heed me when I command you."

With one practiced turn, Xemnas swept around again, robe swirling around him, chin cocked in challenge, resembling in his poise an imperious prince.

"Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir, Xemnas." Said those conscious members of the Organization in sullen unison.

"Hey," Axel whispered excitedly, fingers crawling up the back of Larxene like a spider of some particular perversion. "Somebody got comfy." A giggle was forced, rasping, from Axel's throat.

"Me likey." Larxene callously removed the blade from his forehead and planted it quite a bit lower.

"If you want to keep the other one you'd better shut the hell up." She twisted the knife for emphasis, and Axel let out a high-pitched hoot of pain.

To a man, the Organization either shuddered or flinched, save two. Xemnas bit his lip and tore up the stairs dramatically, holding the hem of his coat. They heard the slam of his office door, but didn't seem cognizant of it.

"What?" Larxene scowled.

"I'm-going-to-be-scarred-for-life." Roxas sputtered in a mewl. Saix looked back at him over his shoulder in commiseration, considering offering a fatherly pat on the shoulder at first, and then deciding he couldn't be arsed about it.

"You have no idea, kid."

"Luxord's brain tissue is like pulped Kleenex," Vexen announced. "How interesting."

The Early Bird Might Be A Worm

A black Ford Explorer pulled up to the speaker system at a popular baked pastry and coffee drive-in frequented universally by hard-working wage slaves. A cheery voice with a history in Southern Asia greeted him, and wondered if he would like to order something from the new menu.

He declined, equally refreshed and cheerful; one large, muscular and hairy arm hanging over the edge of his glossy driver side door.

"Coffee. Cream and sugar sounds nice." He slapped the door eagerly, remembering something. "Oh, and I would like a donut; and a box of donuts for my colleagues."

"Or…" He pulled his arm inside the vehicle, staring past his large square sunglasses at the steering wheel in contemplation. "Maybe I'll be somewhat sneaky."

He popped back outside the window, tapping the door once again with his palm.

"Hold on."

"This is it, Xaldin," He thought to himself. He took a deep breath, and smiled in smug reassurance.

"Make that just one dozen donuts."

…He Who Pays in Cash is Repaid in Blood…

Xaldin parked his SUV in the margins of his parking place, in front of the sign conveniently labeled 'HR Parking'. He removed his effects from the car, his coffee and the box of assorted donuts and the stack of neat, blue, paperclip-edged folders filled with exactly the yield of paper each could manage without bending along the covers.

He closed the door and locked the vehicle with a double beep of his remote on his keys, looking at the nearly blinding white and periwinkle of the concourse leading up to the castle's front.

"The place is very…polished. Nice polished marble floor today. Huh." He trod along it in polished black shoes, the tops of which were covered by pressed, matte black pants, a glossy black belt, and a crisp, blindingly white linen shirt. "I guess I'll have to promote Demyx for not smoking tokes and actually using the floor buffer."

His eyes glanced somewhat above the rims of his glasses.

"I think that's what it's called. Whatever." On the edge of the vista sat one charred wheel rim for no evident reason, which immediately canceled all prospectus of Demyx's promotion.

He came to the door, tucking his paperwork in the wedge between arm and chest and reached for the large, stylized platinum knocker, which greatly resembled the insignia of Organization 13, as per the manager's request.

"Ooh. The knocker looks great." Glossy exterior was cradled gently in his massive paw. Xaldin hesitated. "Inner monologue time."

"Oh, my God. Xemnas is probably inkling right now that I'm the worst HR Director on the face of the planet, other planets, the worlds inhabitable in their entirety…" He trailed off and, deciding against knocking, took the knob in his hands and shrugged.

"Ah, fuck that logic. I do a pretty damn good job with what I have."

The marble door opened, perfectly balanced; a thing of beauty in the HR Director's eyes. Xaldin literally teared up, the corners of his mouth trying to touch the corners of his eyes in unbridled happiness.

"The door doesn't even squeak. Man." The door closed as quietly as it had opened.

"Las Noches is going to love this."

"Huh! I am for one glad that these people are finally taking their jobs seriously." He stated aloud to the hall in general, as there was no one there who could overhear.

His eyes, still covered by their sunglasses, trailed up the vestibule toward Xemnas' office.

"Wonder how the election board is going. He hasn't been taking phone calls. This isn't good."

Xaldin ambled at first, then stalked through the hall in search of people. Axel's office, which was also his recreation and sleeping quarters, showed every facet of disarray it usually did, he noticed, moving past the ajar door.

"Come on; Everybody Stand up!/konnichiwa-ichijouji…takeshi kaneshiro…something something…yadda yadda…what are the words, what are the words?"

Xaldin paused to peer inside. Among the yellow walls, on which pictures were haphazardly thumb tacked, and receipts for sea salt ice cream were stapled in long chains that fell to the floor, Axel twisted his shoulders back and forth and swung his head and hips. He raised each long, darkly clad finger in time with the beat.

"Three-two-one! Make some noise!"

Xaldin shook his head in gentle amusement, and quietly pulled the door closed.

"Same old Axel." He chuckled with a grin, continuing his inner monologue, which never managed to be confined to his head. "What a lazy poster boy for the dead-end slovenly punk. If he were in a manga, Axel would have his own TV series."

"…Does that thought make me an otaku?" He wondered aloud in response to that.

The small eating commons was next on the right. Sometimes he held one-on-one sessions in there, to explain certain behavior that had become of concern. It seemed like a perfect place to set up a box of donuts.

"Ah, Luxord and Lexaeus." He greeted them on sight. One arm raised and supporting donuts, the other clutching a coffee to his chest and papers under it, Xaldin's eyebrows rose over his sunglasses. "Wait…why is Luxord bandaged?" He asked of Lexaeus.

Someone in the corner coughed as a half-hearted reminder.

"And Zexion. Zexion is bandaged too." He turned his head to the right.

"And Marluxia." He said, and then turned his head further to the right. "And Larxene has a bandage on her cheek." Behind his sunglasses, his expression was one of untoward satisfaction.

"Ah. I am needed. You can't leave these immature bastards alone with one another for even minutes." He settled his coffee down on the table, oblivious to Lexaeus' Og-and-Magog, primordial glare.

Coming in sluggishly from the hall, Saix shuffled past Xaldin, moving at a gastropod crawl toward a seat.

"Morning, Xal." He announced, voice muffled by the sleeve of his robe as he stifled a yawn.

"Oh look; Saix. Maybe he'll be able to explain." Xaldin acknowledged Saix with a nod and thumbed his lip as he sat his paperwork on the table beside his coffee. "Pretty down to earth for a Vulcan. Hehe, pun."

"Morning, Saix." Xaldin greeted warmly, keeping the same even, friendly-but-formal tone. "May the Force be with you."

"Star Wars, Xaldin. That, is Star Wars." Saix deadpanned, yawning widely and failing to excuse it.

Xaldin's casual grin became fixed.

"Oh wait; I'm sorry! My bad. What's with the bandages?" He motioned around the room. The movement was followed by setting down the box of donuts at last.

"We had an intruder." Saix explained, as Xaldin opened the box of donuts and claimed one of the powdered ones with the strawberry filling. Saix let the words sink into the quietus afforded by the mummified room.

"Apparently, while Xigbar and I were out obtaining Xemnas' prescription, these…" He indicated the room in general with a weary, deprecatory motion of his hand, letting it drift slowly back down to his side.

"…Failed to lock a door. Just one door. Apparently the front door."

"…The only door we have to enter through." Saix continued woodenly, his countenance pained. Xaldin took his cue, opening the box of donuts fully and ceasing to chew on the one he was holding.

Xaldin set the donut down, cleaned his hands on a napkin and put them palms-flat on the table with a sigh. He started to speak in a very slow, paternal cadence.

"I'm very disappointed in all of you. And here I bought you donuts." He waved his hand over the box of donuts. In his corner, Zexion's newly implanted eyes grew teary with shame. "Let this be a lesson to you all; you get donuts this time. Next time, you don't get donuts."

"You get written up." He told them. "And don't anyone think you're getting workman's comp."

Speech made, Xaldin returned to his donut.

"L-Mfff-mm!" The interruption came from Luxord, whose jaws were wired open with a dental vice, newly attached pink flesh of the tongue hanging out. Much of his face was invisible, for all of the bandages.

Xaldin sighed and turned to Lexaeus, who was staring off into distances not contained by the room in an aggressive fashion.

"Lexaeus?"

"Uh. He said, 'Screw you, you.'" Lexaeus rumbled.

"You you?" Xaldin repeated this laughingly with a skeptical quirk of his lip.

"Excuse me." Lexaeus replied, body shaking, face turning pink very suddenly. "I have to use the bathroom. And spend several hours working out." He picked up a donut, a cruller, and packed it into his cheek, barely chewing it before he swallowed.

"Thank you for the carbs. I'll…need them." With that, Lexaeus pushed his way out of the room.

"Okay." Xaldin shrugged, looking at the list he automatically referred to in his mind as the usual suspects.

"You, you' doesn't have that many syllables. Marluxia; what did he actually say?"

"Mmmr-mrrr." Marluxia muffled. Her meaning came across rather well.

"They both told you you're full of shit." Larxene told him, bobbing forward to snatch up the pair of pink icing covered, sprinkle-bedizened donuts in the box. She handed one to Marluxia. The closing of her mummified fingers around the donut was apace with a Venus Fly Trap.

"I have to ask something of you, Larxene;" Xaldin continued, hands on the table, expression concerned and what he believed was quizzical. The look made him appear on the verge of wetting himself. "Why are you the least scathed?"

"Uh, I have like, electrical powers. My blood's already electrified." She broke her donut apart as if peeling an orange. "So; not hurt." Her fingers popped the broken off piece of donut through the slightly peeling edges of her mouth.

"That doesn't sound very scientific." Xaldin told her, in his patent worried voice. Larxene brought her knee to her chest and gave him her patented, 'I don't give a fuck' shoulder shrug.

"Well, it's the only explanation I have…and, I was standing the farthest away…and I might have, like, used Marluxia and Zexion as human shields."

She popped another slice of donut in her mouth, resembling a little bird. Beside her, the mummified Marluxia weakly tried to lift her hand away from the table toward an inserted feeding tube, the rest of her face bandaged from view.

Luxord's rail-thin fingers, covered in surgical tape, crept into the box and clawed free a messy, cream-filled chocolate donut. Saix, perhaps to avoid the piteous tableau, pushed the donut toward him, and then took one to console himself for his troubles.

"Aha." Xaldin looked down at the table's surface in embarrassment and laughed. "Well, I suppose it's a bit less 'dysfunctional' than I previously thought."

"You figured Xemnas ran around on a killing spree again as fairy Tinkerclaus the Forty-first?" Larxene wondered, handing Zexion a donut after remembering that he was there. She held it out on her finger for him, and his hands, bandaged like boxing gloves, took it awkwardly but gratefully.

"Yeah, kind of." Xaldin looked down at the table, cheeks flushed. He pushed a piece of donut free from his molars with his tongue.

"Dude; any left?" His head snapped up hastily. Demyx was eyeing the box with a misty grin on his face.

"Yes, yes. There's a few left. Take some to Axel and Roxas, would you?" He held out the box to Demyx with unusual enthusiasm. With an animal's suspicious nature, Demyx took from the box with wary fingers. He grabbed a few donuts to his chest and scurried away, almost running over Vexen as he glided by on what might have been the backs of caterpillars.

"Hey Vexen!" Xaldin greeted, popping halfway into the hallway wearing a funny grin. "You want a donut?"

Further along the halls, after the echo had bounced far enough along, Xigbar's blood vessels slammed shut.

"I know that voice…"

"Hey supervisor! Donut this morning?" Xaldin asked of a bypassing Xemnas, who was nose-deep in a book. With Vexen at his elbow working his teeth back and forth like a band saw on one very plain donut, Xaldin was hardly surprised at the startled expression on Xemnas' face.

He pushed the box of donuts into Xemnas' line of vision enticingly.

"Ah, donut." Xemnas snapped his book shut and reached in, eyeing the black chocolate frosting and sprinkles in delight. "Thank you."

He quirked his eyebrows before beaming cattishly at them.

"Or, as our guests next week would say, 'gracias'."

"That's the only word you know so far, isn't it?" Xaldin asked him under his breath, beaming back at him with the same intensity.

Xemnas' face cracked and he laughed lightly.

"Look; I'm making the effort. I bought a book." He tapped the cover with his fingernails, keeping the frosting away from the shiny new orange and black cover. "It is a dictionary; or as the Spanish say, 'dictionario'."

"See? I know two words." He told them, smiling, and laughed to himself on his way down the hall.

"So," Vexen asked, smirking, biting into his finger instead of the donut without managing to notice. "When do you think he's going to figure out that they speak Portuguese instead of Spanish?"

Vexen continued to chew. Behind him, Saix flinched, mortified, and held the donut for a prolonged period of time between his hand and his teeth. Whether it was to contest their assumption, or a display of perturbation in regard to Vexen's eating habits was left in the void of interpretation.

"Probably after he insults their mothers and ancestors." Xaldin told him, grinning.

"Twelve o'clock." Vexen mumbled, backing into Saix, who briefly gagged on a mouthful of donut.

"Huh?" Xaldin turned. It was if Fates collided.

Xaldin tore off his glasses.

"Xigbar..."

"Xaldin…" Xaldin picked up the empty box in one hand; turned into a Taijituan stance.

His eyes went sidelong to Xigbar. Organization 13's characteristic robes materialized.

"I'm out of donuts." Xigbar's baleful cyclopean face went to the empty cardboard just as Xaldin tossed it at him. He barreled past it, hitting Xaldin full in the chest.

Saix pushed Luxord down, which resulted in a scream as Vexen dove the other way. Xaldin and Xigbar sailed swiftly across the table, both caught between a scream and a growl, and went straight through a kaleidoscopically rendered window of stained glass featuring the Organization's pendulum insignia in primary shades and complimentary purples.

The window shattered into a thousand pieces like cheaply molded faux crystal rather than lead and magnesium laced, super cooled lattice and coeffused quartz, the heavy and thick-sheeted stained glass colored by pigments and its base metals it purposed to be.

The wind came at them with a howl. Remnants of the glass clattered as it fell loose and disappeared into the drop below.

After a pause Vexen, Saix, and a mummified and still sightless Luxord crawled to their feet. Hair blowing harum-scarum, they stood in the vacant window, trying to peer down into a thousand foot chasm clouded with mist.

Larxene patted Marluxia's hand and tiptoed after them, nearly tripping over Zexion in the process.

"When did we put that window there?" She wondered from behind Vexen's ear.

"I dunno. Things sometimes happen here for cinematic convenience." Vexen gave her a quick shrug that made his neck disappear for a moment, and sidled aside like a crab so that she could join them. She pushed past Luxord and Saix, Saix more than happy to let her. He moved back toward the table in search of his hopefully undefiled, slightly eaten donut.

"I swear the place is alive." Vexen added, eyes scanning the frame above them for any indication of further falling glass.

Wind ruffled Larxene's hair.

"Creepy." Vexen giggled, eyes still wandering, the whites showing as they did.

"I know. We suddenly have front doors. I didn't even know until that incident with that gentleman."

"Dude;" Demyx gasped, bracing himself against the window as he bit into a donut he wasn't eating when he made off with them. No one knew exactly when he slunk in before that. "You think they're going to fight?"

Bits of donut, made sticky by Demyx's mouth, fell onto Larxene's crown. She tapped her fingers on the window frame in irritation, revolving her eyes upward to glare at Demyx from under her bangs.

"Yeah."

"Like," Here Demyx swallowed. "All over the place?"

"You weren't here, but this used to happen on a daily basis, sometimes hourly." Vexen announced, creeping steadily away from the window, albeit at his particular tiptoeing paramecium glide.

He tilted his head in Xaldin and Xigbar's general direction, looking down one final time.

"And this was before we were nobodies."

Crazed bolts of electricity and a white sheen of excited particles revolved around the two, who were falling fist over hand into the darkness. A sphere of energy enveloped them entirely, and send them through a black, gyrating-pinwheel tear in the darkness, key blade weapons in hand.

The pinwheel tear opened up elsewhere, wind blowing papers and pigeons and tree limbs around wildly. Xigbar and Xaldin landed heavily atop a moving school bus, impact punching them through the aluminum ceiling and landing them across the walkway.

A chorus of children's screams assailed them as they rose to their feet. Xaldin sneered, slinging his lance overhead toward Xigbar's face. Xigbar caught it on his gun, weapon locking for a moment before he fired somewhat impetuously through the floor.

They looked at the gaping hole. Locked gazes with one another. Xaldin swung his lance in the opposite direction, the tip of it screaming as it carved into the bus' metal walls.

The children, quite tiny, howled and tried to duck and cover in their seats. By some fluke, all were entirely missed.

Xigbar panted, blood running past his good eye in a smeary waterfall of crimson, grimacing long canines in exhilaration.

"Come on, you Asian Wolverine!" He screamed in bloodlust, eye glistening in berserker ecstasy. "Fight! Fight damnit!"

"That's right; you just love to fight!" Xaldin quipped, winded, standing in guard position. Sweat ran down his cheek; he wiped it away with the back of his hand. "Don't you, Seagall?"

Xaldin brought his weapon around his body in a graceful arc as Xigbar fired at him screaming like an enraged boar.

Xaldin smacked Xigbar hard enough that he flew down the aisle and into the dashboard. With a running leap, he landed on top of him, grappling his gun with a fist and pressing the pole of his lance into his wiry neck.

Xigbar kicked wildly at Xaldin, until drawing his foot back far enough to make impact with Xaldin's chest, and he sent him through the bus' windshield feet first, flipping up behind him.

Glass filleted the first two rows of seats, where fortunately no children were. Lucky children, in a way.

Xigbar, looming over him, eye hysterical with glee, pressed Xaldin's face into the glass shards littered beneath them, and he screamed in joy as Xaldin yelped. Xaldin threw his arm out desperately. The lance came up, accompanied by its partners. Xigbar pushed against the hood of the bus with his toes and effortlessly somersaulted onto the roof, avoiding a pincushion demise.

Two seconds later, with a wire-fu artist's grace, Xaldin did a dolphin flip over Xigbar's head and dropped heavily onto the roof, feet wide apart, eyes blazing with dull fury in his skull.

A cut on his cheek where his sideburns didn't graze, its thin lines of blood slithering down onto the roof of the bus.

Xaldin held Xigbar's bloodthirsty gaze, on guard, panting, up until he made a small jump to the side, intentionally, off the edge of the bus, landing in a crouch in the middle of the street.

Xigbar heaved himself over the side with a peal of hyena laughter.

Like a cog wheeling free from its axle in the clockwork complexity of a doomsday device, so the cars swerved, began to collide, and began exponentially crashing in a tide of polytrauma in the wake of Xigbar and Xaldin as Xigbar came in howling to close the gap and Xaldin spun his lance and swept it across in a wide circuit around him.

Cars rode up onto the walkways and through shop windows and over carts and stands and the horrified spectators. Xigbar, struck by a car, flew backward; Xaldin hopping between car doors in chase.

The sky was midday blue as they whirred through, weapons like rotors and misfiring pistons, churning vehicles up onto one another, pushing more cars onto the walkways. Hydrants burst. Steel screamed and exploded.

Inevitably, the traffic came to a halt. There wasn't any more room for vehicles to pass among the wreckage and carnage; the slain innocence.

Ten miles across a city. By then, the sky was beginning to turn gold.

"This crosswalk is going to be YOUR BURIAL PLACE!" One-eyed Xigbar gloated in the only free intersection left, a fallen crosswalk pole lying on the sidewalk and across the street behind him.

"Not before I roll your severed head down this manhole!" Xaldin retorted. He stomped down hard on a brass manhole cover below his foot, and it leapt into the air, flipping twice like a coin just before he kicked it at Xigbar, turning it into a discus of death. It slammed, still spinning, into an onlooker in the path behind Xigbar, Xigbar barely even sidestepping it.

He began firing wildly at Xaldin, hitting riot officers fringing the cars behind him.

…Churritos are muy delicioso, mi compadre…

"El Presidente," Began the aide, a handsome fellow with a look of affright plastered over his natural good looks. From his blue armchair, the president in question waved a wrinkled hand.

"Quiet; I'm watching 'Lost'." President Mangrove, Eighty-Eighth president of the Statutory Union. Listless, boorish, and apparently unconcerned with his popularity ratings, secure in his seat of power.

The aide cleared his throat and wiped the sweat of his palm on his hair.

"There has been massive loss of life in F City and the National Guard cannot keep the destruction at bay. Or within reasonable damage. We've lost hundreds, if not thousands of troops."

He paused solemnly, whether out of respect or for B-movie effect was unclear.

"Sir; what are your orders?"

"Um, why don't we call one of 'em Nukuler Strikes down on the place?" Suggested Mangrove. "That fixes it mightily."

"And then we declare it one of 'em No Guys Allowed Land," He continued. As the aide's face turned increasingly purple, he chortled, adding:

"And get me some tacos."

"Yes sir. Right away." The aide replied, leaving the room at a jaunt. Mangrove turned up the volume on the syndicated program.

"Hehehe. Tacos are muy caliente."

…Nuclear Strikes are muy caliente…

Xaldin flung a body overhand; and overhead; in one last desperate attempt. A severed head rolled up to him, the mouth of which was stuffed with a grenade, pin removed.

Xaldin leapt up into the air, somersaulting gently down as the cloud of firework and gore from the grenade descended, spattering the pavement.

"Hehe; you had ENOUGH, piss boy?" Screamed Xigbar, standing on the smoldering bed of an overturned car. He was charred, covered in grease and blood.

Panting, hair tousled, sweat making his robes cling, and blood smeared across his cheek to his lip, Xaldin returned to guard position, aiming the point of his lance at Xigbar's Adam's apple.

"I'm still warming up, you giant cat food pussy!"

"What does THAT even MEAN?" Xigbar shouted back, thrusting his weapon at Xaldin's face from where he perched atop the car. The one remaining wheel, tire flat, spun round and round uselessly.

"Have at you!" Xaldin cried, corkscrewing across the street toward Xigbar. Xigbar leered evilly at the incoming pinwheel of death.

"That's right; say my FRUITY LINES!" Xigbar cackled. "Now you DIEDIEDIEDIEDIE!"

He jabbed at the air as Xaldin closed in, shooting madly into the space he occupied.

A plane, overhead and at a considerable altitude, was still loud enough to possibly wake all they had maimed and killed in their attempt to kill one another.

Xaldin turned away at a jerk, withdrawing his lance from its position against Xigbar's throat. Xigbar's eye grew wide in confusion.

"Wait; you hear that?"

"Hear what?" The plane was loud. High up, and very, dramatically loud for cinematic purposes.

"Eh, crap."

Xigbar sagged against the overturned car, watching Xaldin, back ramrod straight, scanning the sky above in futility.

"Nukes." Xaldin told him. Xigbar hit the side of the car with his gloved, weapon holding hand, putting a dent in the upside-down door.

"Should've known they'd call the nukes again." He grumbled.

"For the record; I'm blaming you." Xaldin told him.

"Hells no! This is YOUR fault!" Xigbar scrabbled against the car to try and gain an upright footing, weapon pointed defensively at Xaldin.

It was the last thing he did that day.

…And now for what you've all been waiting for--a heroic entrance--and a completely unrelated pier…

An inter-dimensional marina, waters lapping at streams of consciousness and space-time. A pier, at which is docked a tall ship with a slight gallery and a strange figurehead.

The taxi cab, depositing three young people, none of which were outstandingly tall. The taxi zipped off, weaving in and out of lanes. As the young people had gleaned from an apparent understanding common among the young, the taxi was a living car of some make and model.

"This." Sora observed, dropping a suspicious looking cigarette and stamping it out with his foot, staring interminably at a fixed point over the docked ship. "Looks ghei."

"Well," Said Riku, bouncing up beside him, eyes blindfolded. "You let me drive the Gummi Ship."

"Dude," Sora looked him up and down, his own eyes clouded by a drug fug. "That should not have been a problem."

"Of course it's a problem." Riku lambasted, fingertips aimed in vertically at his blindfold. "Hello? I'm blind."

"Dude;" Sora deadpanned. "You're about as blind as God."

"Uh, I'm blinder than Tiresias." Riku contradicted matter-of-factly. Sora regarded that for a long moment.

"That is way too educated for this parody."

__

Ack; i no, self. WTF? we r liekk this pear.

Standing nearby them pigeon-toed was a tiny little brunette. With a cell phone.

__

dunno. we r. OTOH we like r gonna die WTFBBQ cuz of some old dood.

__

ROFL. yea for realz.

"Uh, Kairi," Sora began, eyebrows bending strangely over his eyes. "You feelin' alright?"

Kairi's head came up wordlessly, her large eyes seeing past him. Her fingers etched a path across the keypad.

__

dood. BF wants stuff. got to go.

"She's just…staring at you." Riku whispered fearfully. Sora clicked his tongue and twisted his cheek, eyeing Riku.

"How do you know?"

Riku, blindfolded, was at a loss for words. He quickly clenched a fist to his chest.

"…I can feel it!"

"Uhuh." Sora sighed, aware that somewhere in the crossfire of his newly found interest in hashish and Riku's obsession with Zatoichi, their personalities had somewhat polarized. "You know what, man? Whatever."

"Um, well." Riku waved, at least somewhat convincingly, in a direction other than the path to the boat. "We get on the boat?"

"Sure." Sora quipped dryly. "I mean; what choice do we have? You wrecked the Gummi Ship. That old fart is way pissed."

"I didn't know that thing wasn't free." Riku declared with a pout.

__

N E Y lemme C;

Kairi broke in, words somehow translated upon hearing the keypad's beeps, _BFFs wanna go on boat. Fur realz._

"Uh," Sora drawled, moving one languid shoulder toward his ear. "Why can we see her…messaging?"

"Keep quiet before it sees us." Riku barely managed to whisper, so faint had he made his voice. Sora reached over his shoulder, grabbing Riku's zipper in the process. He gave it a slight tug, and began to sashay up toward the planking leading up to the ship.

"And so our young heroes incited their first riot…quest…for paying back car loans." Intoned a deep, informed-sounding masculine voice. Sora sighed.

"Riku; shut up."

Her fingers twitched, fast as a cricket's leg.They both paused to hear, Riku standing on his tiptoes, dwarfing Sora. 


	4. Chapter 4

A/N and Disclaimer Two-for-One: I, Goldcoinz19, hereby give permission for this parody with recognized character stock (copyrighted by Japanese companies) to become an Office Space themed parody. Note: It is not, 'work safe'.

"Rodriguez's second feature may be a rambling, derivative exercise in gratuitous violence, but its determination to proceed as if the word 'restraint' never existed makes for gleeful entertainment."

Geoff Andrews

In sum: If you haven't guessed by now, this is purely gratuitous crack fiction.

…Las Noches Incorporated, Hueco Mundo, Hueco Mundo…

A land of stark contrasts, the sheer absence of night overhead the absence of anything, the white of the city and dunes below the everything that was.

Palatial, Cistercian, sprawling, was the complex, the palace of the Espada and the presiding magnate and arbiter, overseer of all that went on upon the grounds.

Here in the tower, the thing itself a white gleaming phallic symbol, in the boundaries of a mastery of interior design, architecturally a rival of even Frank Lloyd-Wright, Grimmjow Jaegerjacques stood, one knee crooked, before transparent glass.

He gave it a light push and entered, moving in a locomotive slouch, blue stains around his eyes highlighting the grey as they strove right and left in search of familiar faces.

The cubicles were still empty at this hour, which was, overall, unsurprising.

Grimmjow's legs snapped, white-clad, across the cheap, white polyester carpet, the smell of overheated hardware and day-old coffee an acrid tang in the back of his throat. The Danse Macabre rendered by harpies that gave a voice to the dial-up assailed his ears.

Aizen, soulless as he was, however much he was in quintessence a soul, used dial-up.

Ulquiorra, green eyes in a green painted face, stood off to the side in the longest Nehru jacket of anyone under Aizen's employ. This might have had something to do with the fact that he was also one of the shortest.

He was holding an unseen object in his hands, and motioning with them as if trying to shake pepper out of a pepper shaker.

"Morning, Ulquiorra." Grimmjow grimaced. Ulquiorra was preoccupied.

Grimmjow stood on tiptoe, able to make out the hyogoku in Ulquiorra's hands. Ulquiorra shook it like a magic eight ball that wasn't giving him a 'yes' response.

"This…defective…copy…bastard thing…"

"What's wrong with it now?" Aware that, in spite of the hour on the clock, Aizen had wanted him in early, Grimmjow started to move away from the petit arrancar, and his look of puppet umbrage.

Despite his speed in his release form, he didn't seem nearly fast enough to dodge Ulquiorra, who was standing stubbornly in his path to his cubicle, determined to have someone lament his woes.

"I placed the soul of a hollow inside just two minutes ago. It…it jammed." He looked derisively at the magic eight ball of arrancar-replication, which he held in one slender gloved palm.

"Such a piece of shit." Accepting the risk, Grimmjow sidestepped his superior, raised a placating hand.

"Oh. Okay. Hope that works out for you." He turned, jaw clenched, moving determinedly toward his cubicle.

"Where are you going?" Ulquiorra inquired stiffly. Grimmjow pivoted around as he walked.

"To my cubicle, man." He rubbed his hair, which was almost periwinkle. Pinched his nose. "I've got to get those Windward reports done."

"Oh." Ulquiorra let this sink in, and decided to ask the obvious. "Are you behind, again?"

"No, no; I'm not." Pivoting a second time, he bit his fist. "I'm cool. Yeah." He nodded.

Ulquiorra looked at him with flat, reptile eyes as he swiveled back around again.

"Well." Ulquiorra called back. "Good luck with that."

A few minutes later, the hyogoku made a resonant clang as it was thrown against a file organizer.

"You piece of shit!"

Grimmjow padded into the secure, high perimeter that his office space provided, greeted by a pettish grin, pink hair, and the aroma of fresher, gourmet coffee.

"Hey, Szayel."

"Hey, Grimmjow." Szayel stopped to take an indulgent sip of the coffee he'd poured into his mug. The mug was black on white, and had an Escher bird morphing into a fish morphing into a chromosomal pair. "Did you get that memo about the Windward reports?"

"What memo?" Grimmjow asked guardedly, standing up straight. He had a lot more spine than he looked to have, towering over Szayel when he did this.

"About the new cover format." Szayel told him, motioning descriptively with his hands. His coffee shuddered, threatened to spill on Grimmjow's neatly kempt carpet surface.

"…No." Grimmjow was beginning to find himself irritated.

"Ah." Szayel lifted the coffee to his mouth, and drank it as if it was water and not a stimulant first boiled as a cruel prank somewhere in the farthest back annals of Man. He exhaled happily, smacking his lips. "Aizen's going to have your head for that. Around this place; probably literally."

"What are you up to?" Grimmjow asked, aware that he wasn't. His eyes pinched at the corners.

"Medical." Szayel replied with a cruel snicker. "Got to evaluate some client history. Some future clients." Szayel leaned back, settling his buttocks on a desk that ordinarily belonged to Yammy, spreading his legs out. He set the coffee, however precariously, in his lap, one hand holding onto the handle to steady it.

"Company sent over a lot of coverage papers." He brushed the steam from his glasses with his free index finger, smiling like a pumpkin hacked at its equator for Halloween. "Total hand job there. Worst files I've ever seen."

"Really?" Grimmjow replied, feigning interest. A tear was beginning to bead in his right eye.

"I think they forged half this shit." Szayel giggled. "Bunch of disorganized retards if you ask me."

"Hey; get this." He tried to balance the tip of his toe on the opposite wall of the cubicle, his coffee sputtering in its cup. Grimmjow flinched, turned away.

"The guy who's the head of the company?"

"Yeah?"

"Name's an anagram for 'Mansex'." Grimmjow, who had pulled out his chair, turned his head slowly to the right. He held Szayel's smug gaze for a moment.

"No way." Szayel drummed an index finger on Yammy's desk.

"Look for yourself."

Grimmjow had to. Curiosity is an indefensible mechanism, and inevitable in its compulsion. Mankind is riveted together in ways that are meant to reward wandering, and wandering is in many ways greeted with reward.

Two traits homologous, Grimmjow's eyes peered over the manilla folder as his fingertip lifted the edge and pried it open. He read past the header. His face, which Szayel was reading intently, and responding to with similar intensity, burned with mischief. It was like taking a flickering match and lighting a burner in an old fashioned oven.

Grimmjow's mouth was a row of teeth. Szayel's self-indulgent straightening of his back in aplomb and pomp almost repaid him with a lap full of boiling coffee. His foot slipped, and he swiveled, managing to grip the mug just tight enough to ensure that nothing spilled over and made his day unpleasant.

Grimmjow hadn't noticed.

"Oh man," Grimmjow giggled maliciously. "This is either the worst company ever or absolutely the best."

"I know." Szayel growled with glee.

Eyes gravitating leftward, somewhat fatefully, Grimmjow saw Kaname Tosen's stick-it note, on hot pink paper, written in purple gel pen. Noticeable, if impossible to read.

"Shit!" He made a grab for it, but by then a cold chill ran down his back, and a long, stark shadow settled over the cubicle, rendered incomprehensibly by the diffuse lighting.

"Hey; Grimmjow!" Tosen barked, a-grin, no doubt. Grimmjow walked himself in a circle, stopping to look Tosen full in the face, to what impact he wasn't sure.

"Morning, Tosen!" What Tosen did next gave Grimmjow a start. The man coldly raised his first two fingers, nails toward Grimmjow.

"How many fingers am I holding up?" He inquired, something bruising about the musical lilt of his voice.

"…Two?" Grimmjow's teeth were set on edge, his lip curled under like that of a deceased rock and roller.

"Ah, good." Tosen smiled thinly at him, taking his fingers away. "I was starting to think you were as blind as I am."

"Did you get that memo, Grimmjow, about the covers for the Windward reports?" His voice became low, conspiratorial, almost breathless.

"Uh…" Grimmjow, locked in breath with Tosen, screwed his eyes up toward Szayel, who gave a frantic, helpless shrug.

"Uh…yeah?"

"Good." Tosen sprang back, as easily as he had sprung forward. "We're going to need those by the end of the day."

"Fuck."

Tosen turned, a predatory gleam in the way his lip quirked, a menace about his sightless eyes.

"What was that?"

"Getting right on it!" Grimmjow announced, voice harsher than he had intended. He was inwardly glad for it.

Tosen nodded, appeased.

"Good." He turned and left the cubicle at a swift proceeding pace, one of his sculpted hands on the zanpakutou he had lashed to his belt.

Grimmjow traded a look with Szayel, who seemed deeply sympathetic, if not supportive, and tiptoed toward the edge of the cubicle, leaning out. He could see Tosen, rapidly retreating back toward Aizen's council room.

To his receding back, Grimmjow held up a rather obvious finger.

"Do you see how many fingers I'm holding up?" He hissed. Grimmjow pulled himself back inside the cubicle. "Douchebag!"

"He is." Szayel agreed, looking down at the drops of coffee saturating into the raiment that cloaked his thigh. Following his train of vision, Grimmjow nodded all the more ferociously.

"I know! I hate that guy."

"So…" Szayel kept his gaze down, bringing the coffee to his lips. "How far along are you?"

Grimmjow's bright eyes drew a blank.

"Uh…"

A soft sound ejected from Szayel's lips. A piteous laugh.

"Dude; you are so screwed."

"Shut up. I know; I'm getting on it." Grimmjow slipped back over to his desk, pulled out his chair a few more inches, and sat down, his back turned squarely toward Szayel.

"Well, if you're behind…"

Grimmjow ran his fingers down his face.

"I know." He looked to the white torture of his cubicle's high wall, sighed at the slightly itchy, dense loomed fabric skin that barricaded him from the other Espada.

Grimmjow sighed a sigh of a desperate man that no miracles could possibly save.

"I think…Aizen's probably going to make me come in on Saturday."

…In Which A Leader Calls For Obsequiousness…For Only The Hundredth Time…

Xemnas stroked the silk collar absently, attempting to discern whether the deep burgundy of it blended too much with the tawny amber of his skin, or conflicted with the pale sweep of his bewildered long hair.

"So, how do I look?" He asked not of the mirror, but of the man standing several steps below it, who regarded him with a typical sickly grin.

"Do I look like a gay fashion designer to you?" Xigbar groaned, eye rising beneath his eyelid contemptuously.

"No," Xemnas twisted the lapel of his shirt, so that it cleaved to his skin with less crease around the collarbone, "You look like a gay pirate."

He tightened his tie, which was an olive brown banded with diagonal yellow pinstripe. Behind him, Xigbar tightened his face.

"So," Xigbar began, flipping a black-gloved hand over on the air, palm up. He had made no effort to dress up, style his hair differently, or in any way make himself more palatable.

Xigbar took to pacing back and forth. "What you're basically asking me is…if I was at sea for several months with only men and no showers and a couple of really hot days where everyone's greasy and half-naked, would something like you fulfill my wanton desires as I lay hidden somewhere in the corner of the sleeping quarters crammed against a few other guys in the darkness?"

He paused to look up, working his jaw. Xemnas' yellowish, bulls-eyed eyes were tugged along the very lines of his skull.

Xemnas looked up toward the ceiling, speechless.

"That was frightfully descriptive." He squeaked out at last, stiffening his posture. He looked down beatifically at Xigbar.

"Please don't open your mouth for a while. Actually; just don't be in my presence. If I see you keeping mum somewhere behind me, I'll probably have to freak out."

"Yeah, whatever 'Mansex'." Xigbar grumbled, looking at his shoes. Xemnas' eyes pulsed, growing horrifying large and shrinking far too expressively for his purported lack of emotion.

"I thought I informed you that I'd start cutting out the tongues of those who forgot and called me that!" He sputtered.

"Well, maybe I don't like my tongue." Xigbar retorted, grinning nauseously.

"Don't you test me…"

"Shut up!" Larxene shouted from the corner of the room, where she was carefully curling her cowlick. Her suit was flatteringly masculine, olive brown, though slightly darker than Xemnas' tie and more subdued. She looked at them from under shadowed eyes. "Boss; you're fine. Xigbar's a douche. And I'm sure lots of desperate, cloistered women would find you irresistible."

"I wasn't asking how sexually appealing I was, you nincompoops!" Xemnas bellowed, gripping the lapels of his jacket in an attempt to avoid resorting to the medium of violence. "I was trying to look presentable for a business meeting!"

He turned his back to them in exasperation, straightening the strands of hair that fell into his face, his suit lapel, each cufflink…

"…Who uses the word 'nincompoop', anyway?" Xigbar quipped aloud.

"Fuck you! Is that better, Xigbar? Does your peon-sized little mind understand that?" He glared at Xigbar, saw Larxene twisting her wrist peculiarly in order to achieve her curl.

"You know what? The both of you can get out! I don't need your snide remarks!" Xemnas hissed. He swerved away from them, straightening his cuffs out of view.

"Get me Xaldin, or Vexen… or someone who isn't a complete fuckwit."

"Sheesh." Larxene muttered, setting the curler down and switching it off. "Fine."

She skulked out into the hall, returning less than a moment later with Xaldin, who sneered at Xigbar, who sneered back. Hackles raised.

Larxene elbowed him sharply in the ribs, and pointed to where Xemnas sat at a library desk he'd installed for the effect it would bring to the otherwise dark, amorphous room.

"You called?" Xaldin asked. His suit was charcoal, the suit jacket folded over one of his arms.

"You look like you're going to a funeral." Xigbar sneered, skulking off to the edge of the room.

"Yes." Xaldin whispered back irately. "Yours."

"Yes." It took Xemnas a moment to respond. He was still fidgeting with the sleeves, which were slightly too short. "How do I look?"

He spread his arms out, pulling his chest up. Xaldin scratched wonderingly at his cheek.

"Like a would-be world conqueror in a monkey suit." It was a statement more than a suggestion.

Off in the corner, Xigbar kicked at a wall hanging.

"You're such an asswipe..."

"So; does that mean I look presentable?" Xemnas turned again, attempting a charming smile.

Xaldin grinned fixedly at him.

"Yeah, sure."

Xemnas closed his eyes, allowing one of his hands a little floreo.

"Then you may leave." He said. Opening his eyes, he remembered the others, and pointed to them, finger moving as if checking off an invisible box on each one of them. "Take those two with you. Their insolence is making me crampy."

He clamped a hand on his stomach for effect. Xaldin nodded, motioning for the others with a broad sweep of his hand. He left the room at a well-muscled gait. Larxene followed, sticking her tongue out at the world in general as she went.

A few minutes later Xigbar oozed through the opening, badly bruised over his blind eye from where a book had collided with his forehead. He nodded to himself, biting his lip.

Xaldin politely closed the door behind them.

"WHAT ACORN IN THE HUNDRED ACRE WOOD CRAWLED UP HIS ASS AND GREW INTO AN OAK?" Xigbar hollered.

"Well, if you had any common courtesy." Xigbar bounced around to Xaldin and pointed a coiled finger at him, taking a step closer.

"Oh, you mean like you? I'm sorry if I don't want to stick my head into his BUTT CRACK for the sake of maintaining my EXISTENCE!"

"At least my job description isn't a bathroom code."

"Ooh. A potty joke. How classy."

Xaldin cocked his head, unmoving, like a mastiff preparing to be assailed by a particularly yappy Doberman. Xigbar tensed, teeth bared upward into Xaldin's face.

Larxene stood against the wall, goggle-eyed. The tableau was read much differently, in her mind.

"Um." She looked aside, clearing her throat. Xaldin and Xigbar switched their gazes to her, a discomfiting thought.

She knit her fingers together, pulled them apart. Played with her knuckles, fingertips chasing fingertips over them.

She sighed irritably, and crumpled against the wall, looking back at them, into Xaldin's eyes, taut with confusion, and Xigbar's unreadable but more than likely cynical leer.

"Are the two of you…like, you know, doing one another, or something?"

What made it worse was the motions she made with her hands.

Xigbar turned on heel, an immediate pivot of one hundred and eighty degrees.

"Let's just forget it." Xigbar sighed in self pity as he swept away.

Xaldin just gaped at her.

"That was…" He moved his mouth; words failed to issue. He continued to gape.

"I'm leaving." He told her at last, and turned one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction and started to walk away as fast as his lumbering pedestrian speed could take him.

"God, men are stupid." Larxene told the hall in general, arms crossed. She clicked her tongue.

"Tch." Her eyes opened a shade widely, to Xigbar, who was walking backward down the hall, Vexen moving toward him with his hands clasped in front of his face. Larxene couldn't help but leer at the gold, glittering suit, unsuitable even for a ringleader in a carnival.

He tilted his stovepipe hat to her politely, twirling his cane before tucking it beneath his arm. He seemed to have borrowed one of their interdimensional neighbor's enduring scarves, as well as a monocle. There was a suggestion of lip gloss.

"Well, is everybody who doesn't look like a living mummy and isn't Axel ready to go through my inter-dimensional portal?" He asked, coming to a stop before Xemnas' office.

"I wouldn't have even bothered, you know, patching them up, having nanobots scrub every last trace of carbon from the walls, if I'd known we were visiting them." He added reproachfully, standing coolly in profile beside Xigbar.

"Well, it's not my job to be your personal secretary." Xigbar grunted. His face seemed to flip directions as his head moved in search of a lost target. He spied it well enough, and thrust both index fingers toward it. "That would give that one a little oxygen from the spare moments when he wouldn't have his head tucked under the leader's tailbone."

"Fuck you, Xigbar!" Xaldin shouted blithely, raising what was just barely distinguishable as a middle finger.

"Wow." Vexen stated dryly, chin tucked in toward his chest. "It's really a lion cage around here. What have I missed?"

"Nothing that can't be attended to with a good cortical shot of lead." Xigbar grunted. Vexen's unusually straight eyebrows rose, one after the other, like drumsticks. One of them seemed to do The Wave.

"Don't you mean cortiso--oh, I get it. Tee-hee." He shrugged, a motion that may have required more effort of him, as he did not exactly shrug his shoulders.

"Well, have everyone able meet by my teleporter in oh--five minutes."

"Um," Larxene itched at her collar, pulling her tie with both hands in order to smooth it against her blouse. "I didn't want to like, mention this before…"

She pushed against the wall, unable to look Vexen in the eye in all his antedated frippery. She flailed a hand weakly.

"But we, um, well. We kinda have a, like, key blade wielder for that."

"That's experimental technology." Vexen told her airily, perishing the thought with a wave of his hand. Larxene's mouth unhinged.

"Did you…you did. You just referred to him as experimental technology." Shocked still, perhaps needlessly, she detached herself from the wall and rounded on Vexen, fists balled, face distorted by a pout.

"Your point, miss?" He inquired, smiling thinly in amusement as his bony knuckles met with the polished surface of the intricately inlaid door.

She threw a hand up in the air, crossing her arms, a gesture mimicked by Demyx and Axel from time to time, to greater and lesser degrees.

"God, you're so creepy."

…It's Going To Take Us Away, HaHa…

"Behold my quantum teleportation device." Vexen introduced them to a large … He looked upon it in all of its prodigious hulking a shade paternally, twisting toward them in eerie slow motion, like a ballerina in a music box. He steepled his fingers. "The full title of which is of course Quantuum Unipolar Automatic Light Ultranegative Utility for Directional Extrusion Suspension, or QUALUUDES for short."

Vexen cleared his throat, reaching behind him for something on his worktable. He lifted and held out for them a small gray plastic stylus, onto which was clipped a worksheet and pen. The pen was attached with a springy plastic cord, translucently orange.

Vexen smiled sweetly, batting his eyes.

"Now, I need you to sign this disclaimer before we go in there."

The group, to a man and a fraction woman, gave him a graven, jaundiced look that summarized their blind concurrence, and on a scale, no less, in very large print.

"You're not you, are you?" Xigbar intoned. Vexen smiled quickly, wax features melting into an odd rictus in a vain attempt at proof of innocence.

"Whatever do you mean?"

"You're a fucking clone." Xigbar groaned, covering his face with a hand. "You're sending some puppet machination through this portal to make sure it works properly."

The look upon Vexen's face was one an angel would wear after a near-fatal concussion.

"How do you figure?"

Xaldin, in response, came up quickly, ripped one of the disclaimer sheets from the board with a tear that made Vexen's eyebrows twitch.

He read down, scanned the very bottom, and drew reading glasses from his pocket. Eyebrows pinching in strain, he pulled a loupe from his pocket, and twisted it against his eye, murmuring to himself.

"The part in this disclaimer that says if we're atomized and reconfigured from atmospheric particles that are not our own or turned violently inside out, and in either of the two cases stated survive this, that you are not culpable and we cannot sue." He said at last, throwing the paper back at Vexen.

"I haven't the foggiest what you're going on about." Vexen rubbed the tips of his fingers together as he grinned, possibly attempting to disappear, like the Cheshire cat.

"I hate you." Xigbar announced, making a face. Vexen shrugged. It was not as if it could be helped. Xemnas, for his part, was now standing before the automated door.

He caught Saix's eye. Saix sighed and, with one quick motion snatched the back of the black Batman licensed hoodie Axel had decided was for formal occasions.

"Just to be on the safe side, we'll send Axel first." Xemnas told the room at large, holding his hands out evenly as Saix dragged Axel toward the portal. He turned to face Axel, who was aflame with silent indignation…and had a finger jammed into his nostril.

In one fluid motion, Xemnas pressed the button and Saix, holding Axel by the shoulders, tossed him through. White light crazed across the room, reminiscent of a bug zapper, and the titanium door slats slid back into place.

With much pomp, Xemnas reached into his pocket and produced a phone. Flipping it open, he carefully punched the ten digits needed to arrive at Axel. The phone curiously stopped on the third ring.

"You…inside out?" Xemnas inquired, perhaps superfluously. He nodded to himself.

"No?" The phone, which was compact, silvery and tested multiple times as a thing of indestructibility, was slipped back into Xemnas' pocket.

Their leader made an 'o' with his fingers, which is considered an insult in many Eastern European countries.

"It's good."

"All right." Vexen announced with a sigh to the mob, well versed in recriminating eyeballing, that had surrounded him.

"It's safe."

Xemnas whistled and gave Saix a firm push through the open portal door. The room erupted in another whitish flash.

Larxene shook her head in disbelief, turned to her HR Director, and gestured hopelessly in Xemnas' direction.

"I just can't think about my job safety when we have a leader like this." She told him.

…It's an Occupational Hazard…

"I just can't think about my future in securities when we have such an asshole for a boss." Grimmjow told Nnoitra, in the absence of hope and in the presence of a slight tinge of self-pity. Nnoitra gave him a sympathetic tilt of the head, knocking his fists over Grimmjow's and pulling them back to his chest in a gangster show of support.

"Hang loose, man. Every little thing's gonna be alright."

"Yeah." Grimmjow huffed, staring at the demonic mound of paperwork his hands rested upon, fingers twitching. "Right."

Orihime walked into the cubicle by accident, (or perhaps on purpose, thought Grimmjow darkly) and cautiously backed out. Being Orihime, she reacted too much to the ragged expression on the Espada's pale face.

"Aw." She giggled at Grimmjow like a homeowner might at a cat that had tangled itself up in yarn and was now rolling about the floor mewling piteously. "Poor Grimmjow! You look like you have a case of 'The Mondays'."

Grimmjow's mouth twisted in barely contained horror. Nnoitra, an omnipresent case of too tight underwear making him the most irritable creature dead or alive, scowled as hatefully as he possibly could.

Orihime ended her laughter with a choke, gulped, and ran, possibly for dear life.

"Who says that?" Grimmjow wondered aloud, squinting evilly in the direction of Orihime's retreating form. "What does that even mean?"

Nnoitra pulled himself off of Yammy's desk, knocking papers carelessly to the floor. He pointed at Grimmjow with a skeletal finger.

"You know; if I were you, I'd kick her ass." Grimmjow squinted up at him; shook his head.

"You kick everyone's ass." Nnoitra opened his mouth like an ass-kicking muppet. He crossed his arms broodingly.

"I do not."

"Okay, fine." Grimmjow said evenly, raising a hand. "Name one person you haven't kicked the ass of."

Grimmjow had expected an immediate snap of 'no one!', or perhaps a scoff that indicated how flawed the challenge was. What he didn't expect was for Nnoitra's eyes to mist over, as if conjuring an image of the face of God.

"…There was one person, once…" Nnoitra told him softly. He sighed deeply, ruefully. "I could have kicked his ass forever…"

Grimmjow nodded in agreement. He had those days.

"I know what you mean." He told Nnoitra, a shade sardonically. "I could have beaten Ichigo bloody until hell froze over."

In actuality, he could have done so just as long as Ichigo kept moving. It wasn't fun when you couldn't bat things around that weren't still moving. It was like a very bad game of individual paddleball.

Or his bulletin. Tosen hadn't covered it in post-it notes for weeks, now, and it held nothing for him. He used to enjoy ripping them up with his claws.

"Yeah." Grimmjow continued, discomfited by the nagging feeling that his afterlife was letting him down. Nnoitra gave a nod, head bobbling on a skinny neck, teeth bared too visibly by his overbite.

"You know, man? I don't even know his name."

…The Ones We Left Behind…

"I'm gonna take real good care of you folks, man."

"So; who wants macaroni?" Demyx sang out, entering the room with a couple of steaming microwave-heated bowls balanced against his hip on a cookie tray.

Seated in a straight line against the wall, limbs arrayed however they could, Luxord, Marluxia and Zexion tried to shuffle away from the palpable heat.

Demyx, without aid of an oven mitt, (which he wore to remove the cool tray and threw into the sink) lifted the ribbed cardboard macaroni by a skinny edge. He lost his grip on it, and it plummeted into Luxord's lap.

"Mrrffff!" A muffled Luxord screamed. Demyx's mouth formed a ring of horror and he stepped back sharply, raising his hands in defense.

The rest of the macaroni clattered to the floor and erupted out of its cartons, melting the plastic spoons.

"Whoops. Sorry, man. Dropped it in your lap." Demyx lifted the spilled cartons on the suddenly too-hot-to grip cookie tray, and tripped his way over the writhing Luxord to Zexion.

"Nrfff!" Zexion whimpered through his bandages, struggling to crab walk out of Demyx's eager, psychotically helpful reach. "Nrfff!"

Demyx followed at a crawl, eyes wide, curious, oblivious to the horror of his pursuit in the bandaged eyes of Zexion.

"Dude, where are you going, man?" He tripped over the hem of Zexion's robe, falling forward onto him. "Whoops!"

The flat of the scalding tray hit Zexion squarely in the face.

Demyx climbed over the screaming, violently shaking Zexion, smearing the burning, tingling macaroni on his fingers onto the other man's robe.

He sat up, macaroni dripping from his spiked hair, and watched Zexion claw at the macaroni-coated bandages on his face.

"Why're rolling around like that, man?"

"Mrff-mrff-rff-rff." Marluxia shouted from behind him, managing to barely scrape Demyx's back with a kick. He salvaged a bowl from the floor, contents mostly within, and twisted around on his knees to flourish it in her face.

"Aw," The hot steam bleared Demyx's eyes. "Sorry dude. You want some macaroni too?"

Marluxia yelped and kicked out, trying to find a grip against the wall. She lifted herself up, managed a run before she slipped, falling backwards head over feet on the slick floors and the vehicle of macaroni.

Paper tore away from paper and steam clouded around Lexaeus like mist surrounding a mountain. He regarded Demyx with bulging, yellow-rimmed eyes.

"Thanks for the carbs. I'm going to my room now, to work out for hours on end." He moved slothfully, bound by behemoth muscle, gradually turning his back to Demyx as he gradually took his first spoonful of macaroni with a bubbling spoon.

"Rock on." Demyx told the retreating-so-slowly-as-to-not-be-retreating-at-all form. "That is so Bruce Banner."

Demyx's voice bounced off of the high vaults.

"Hehe. Echoing voice."

…Las Noticias por a Noche…

In the midst of vaulted ceilings much higher than those at headquarters, the organization stood either gob smacked, humbled, or in quiet furor over ceilings being much too damn high for show.

"Wow." Xaldin walked into a catafalque, smoothing his broad hands over the marvel approvingly. "This place is so white, bright, and polished."

Xigbar shrugged a shoulder, as if pretending to listen, deeply aggravated by the showiness and slavish lack of all personality about the place.

"It's like being back in Panawave." He muttered, adding further, in an even lighter breath. "With Xemnas."

Xemnas was pacing back and forth irritably, eyes scouring the walls and the distance of the corridor for signs of life. He had a hand clenched firmly on the edge of Saix's odd, dark green suit ensemble, which was unlike a three piece and still not quite a caftan.

"Where did Axel go?" He hissed irritably under his breath. "He was supposed to wait for us on the other side!"

"Omigod-what-if-we-can't-get-back-oh-no-nooo-the-movie-plot!" Roxas fell over all of a sudden, fingers pressing into the muscles of his face.

He gagged, or gasped raggedly for air; Saix wasn't certain, and then began to bawl.

Xemnas let go of his shoulder. With exaggerated care, Saix walked over to him, and dropped to one knee.

"Roxas." He looked aside, a deep groove forming in his cheek as he frowned. "Pipe down, please."

"But-the-Saix-the-movie-oh-nooo!" Roxas cried in a deep, growling voice of terror, body shaking against the floor.

Saix glanced up, in search of something he could metaphorically cling to. Xigbar shrank away from him with a glare. Xaldin was obliviously admiring the architecture. Vexen's face was obscured by a rather large pillar, and the architecture was as bland as Styrofoam.

"What happened in the movie that disturbs you so much?" He said at last, resigned to sink.

"Maybe you should make him explain things better and tell us what fucking movie he's talking about." Xigbar seethed. With surprising temperance, Saix held up a hand.

"Just let him tell us." Saix leaned over Roxas' quaking shoulders, trying to meet the frightened youngster's gaze.

"What happened in the movie?" He inquired, in a voice stretched diaphanous by emotional exhaustion. (As if that could happen, his brain added treacherously, recalling how Xemnas saw the state of affairs under the veil of strong anti-psychotic medication.)

Roxas sat up and gulped, eyes bulging as he screamed.

"Jackals-ate-people!"

"The dingo ate his baby? What?" Saix waved his hand quickly at Xigbar, and looked back to Roxas.

He sighed in relief.

"Oh. That movie." Rubbing his chin thoughtfully, Saix contemplated what could be said to lessen the mortal terror the immortal child was in. The proper words soon formed.

Saix looked down at Roxas paternally, managing a slight, reassuring nod of his head.

"It's okay. Because Kurt Russel isn't here. And, when Kurt Russel isn't here, bad things can't happen."

Roxas looked up at Saix with dishpan eyes.

"R-really?" The elfin, blue-haired member of the organization gave an indifferent shrug, checking it quickly.

"Yes." He told Roxas with a cough, "He got replaced by Richard Dean Anderson, who is much, much cooler. He can't be fed his lines by nasty jackal people."

Brushing his hands off, he helped Roxas to his feet. The boy had a death cling around his wrist, which was putting him off-centre.

"Incidentally, though, if it had been the actual god Anubis, nothing would have preserved them." Saix rambled on blankly, trying to unscrew Roxas' hands from his wrist. "What a god wants, Roxas, he takes."

He winced. Roxas bawled.

"Weeeeeeeeh!"

Xemnas looked up from the game of hangman he was playing with Vexen on the wall. Xigbar threw his hand at his face temperamentally.

"Oh, bajeezus!" Xigbar yelled, bringing his weapons into view. "Good one, Saix!"

His head swiveled around like a cockerel on crystal meth, seeking something to maim, most likely Axel.

"It was a universal fact." Saix protested. He managed to remove Roxas' fingers, sticky with sweat and tears and smelling as they did of fear, and barely sighed as Roxas screamed all the louder and sought the protection of being balled on the floor, arms wrapped around one of Saix's stick thin legs.

He looked down, literally, on the child that seemed to be straddling his foot.

"Roxas. If a god wanted you, that would mean you were somehow special. Right?"

"You're just making it worse." Xigbar scowled, stalking toward Xaldin, who was pacing back and forth nonchalantly, earphones of an mp3 player clotting his ears.

He hesitated, coming to a pause that seemed to rid him of even a heartbeat, wheeled around suddenly, and blurred across the floor to Saix.

Roxas fell over, having been cuffed on the back of the head. A convention that could arguably be found in the lack of supermarkets in fantasy universes.

"There." Xigbar announced smugly. "Much quicker and in less of a need of explanation. Flatten his ass."

"Wait-wait-wait. Here they come." The cry for silence went up like an alarum. Larxene was making impressive ground through a corridor, considering that she was moving at a friendly pace along a tall, white clad man flanked on either side by men not nearly as tall, and also robed in white.

"So that's where she went." Xemnas murmured to Vexen approvingly. Vexen snatched the red sharpie pen away from Xemnas and hid it in one of his numerous pockets.

"What about their child labor laws?" He mentioned, waving toward Xigbar and Saix. Vexen twisted his head around like an owl, sighting upon them as he rapped on his teeth with a pencil-thin finger.

"Ah, crap." He turned back to Xemnas. "You really think they have that policy?"

Xigbar lifted Roxas, cradling him to his chest. Saix brushed his knees off and rearranged the hem of his robe.

They looked around, eyes chancing on a closet.

"I have an idea." They said in unison.

Xigbar and Saix whistled past Xaldin, who had examined his watch and was removing his earphones.

"What…" A door banged shut. Xigbar and Saix sauntered back, whistling.

Xaldin looked at Xigbar from under his heavy brow. Xigbar responded with an overly large and gleaming fake grin, a spark of challenge in his eye.

Saix had begun edging away from the two when Xemnas' mangled Spanish occluded their eardrums.

"Ah! Ole, muchas bienvenidas! Mi companeros. Avante!" The three of them winced at the back of their employer, his hands stretched out in greeting, smiling with politically calculated politeness.

The exaggerated approach was not earning him any favors. Aizen-sama of Las Noches Limited looked drier than a Utah prohibition, like he'd mummified himself alive ages before. Clean, exact, suspiciously handsome, but otherwise as brittle as a dead leaf pressed in a Victorian flower press and left in the Atacama Desert.

He licked his lips, and started to orate. Aizen had lost meaning of the concept of speaking long ago.

"I speak…" There was some moments of small sounds, such as humming, before he resumed that train of thought. "Well, let's see. English. Japanese. Brazilio-Portuguese. Latin. Greek. Ah…"

There was a long pause. (Xemnas had held his breath for a moment; Larxene quickly punched his diaphragm, to ensure that he would attempt to breathe and not pass out in expectation.)

"Ah…" The voice of Aizen drawled. (Xaldin clutched his head dizzily and had to stand against the wall. Saix's eyebrows tangled in his hairline, and Xigbar had to pinch himself to keep from laughing.)

"Ah…" Aizen tilted his head left. (Xemnas tripped over himself, catching himself before he tried to stop the noise by pushing Aizen's sagging jaw back into place.)

"Ah; Buenos Noches?" Xemnas suggested worriedly, rubbing his palms together. Beside him, Larxene nervously squeaked, something that may have been meant as laughter.

Aizen's mouth came to a close.

"Ah, yeah; I speak that, too." Aizen replied loftily. (Behind him, the blind subordinate rubbed at his forehead with his wrist.)

"How quaint." Vexen mumbled acidly. Xigbar's leg crumpled at the ankle from the force of Saix's boot landing on it.

Aizen's eyes began to gravitate toward the noise…

"Well, I'm glad to be dealing with such a…cultured individual." Xemnas inserted, giggling frantically.

In the background, Xaldin had placed Xigbar in a stranglehold, one leg around him like a man wrestling an alligator, and was attempting to tie his mouth closed one-handedly with Saix's cultural sash.

"Yeah, well…" Aizen's eyes tried to run for home. Xemnas slithered into their line of view, holding up his hands and flashing his most Stepford-like uxorial grins.

"They're fine." He clapped his hands together, peeking over his shoulder quickly. Xigbar, mouth gagged, had wrestled Xaldin to the ground, jabbing his elbow in his chest.

Xemnas squinted furiously at Saix, who promptly kicked Xigbar off of Xaldin. Xaldin grunted, and instead of getting to his feet, immediately heaved himself at Xigbar.

His head snapped back to Aizen. "Really; they're fine."

Larxene coughed, stepping backwards and sidestepping Xemnas. He quickly raised a hand, waving it in a figure eight motion in the space she occupied.

Though he showed no signs of it outwardly, Xemnas desiccated in the rays of Aizen's superiority complex. It was a gaze that seemed to go on infinitely without end in sight, the culmination of all the stern, no-nonsense gazes of so many professors and supervisors Xemnas had encountered, all of them treating him like a futile insect, or a necessary burden.

It wore away at Xemnas.

"I see." Aizen stated. His eyes moved past Xemnas, as if moving past a speck of dust. "Yeah…let us get to the office. Yeah…so we can discuss your insurance…"

He paused long, taking in enough air to fill the Hindenburg, it seemed.

"…Policy." And Thus Aizen Spoke. Aizen's blind subordinate quickly came to the fore, extending a hand in the direction of the conference table.

"Right this way, gentlemen." Xemnas followed the subordinate, and was in turn followed by Larxene, who tightly held a grip on Xigbar's ear. Xaldin fell into line behind him smugly, a condition that did not go unpunished by a sharp elbow to his intestines.

Saix detached himself from the wall, removing the lance embedded in a quarter inch of crystal and his sleeve. He caught himself turning, startlingly, toward the door, where Aizen's albino assistant was smiling at nothing--as well as looking directly at him.

"So…" The albino assistant wandered over to Saix, pulling behind him a tuft of red, burned hair, connected to a matchstick thin body broken at odd angles. It looked peculiarly like a marionette, dangling from the albino's hand like that. "I have this here."

With little effort at all, the frail-looking albino, who was smiling in the most off-putting way imaginable, lifted Axel by the hair. He was badly charred, lilac purple tongue hanging out. He was giving off the odor of death, perhaps because he'd been so fully done in.

"Does it belong to you?" Wondered the albino, who seemed unawares of the fact that the corpse was mangled horrifically, in ways that even Xigbar wouldn't have executed.

"Y-yeah. It's our janitor." Saix forced air through his trachea, like trying to breathe through a snorkel for the first time. "He fell through the transporter accidentally."

"Ooh." The albino clicked his tongue teasingly, turning his face toward a hallway that led to cubicles. "Not a good sign."

"Not a good sign at all." The albino repeated. He may have looked at Saix, but it was hard for him to know.

Reading something in Saix's rigidly held frame, the albino pushed at the air with a tut, a gesture that did not mitigate anything, for he did it with the hand that held that held onto what precious little remained of Axel.

"Oh, I don't mean you. I mean that sign over there on the wall." The albino's face slithered in the direction of the cubicle-lined area in front of him. "It's tilted halfway to China. I'm going to have to go and straighten it up."

He raised his hand, the one holding Axel. Saix closed his eyes and shuddered.

"Can I borrow your janitor?"

"Keep him if you want." He told the albino quickly. The albino moved his head like a little bird, inspecting the corpse, which he held out at length, with one ink brushed eye.

"Oh, really?"

"No, not really." Saix sighed, his voice on edge. "Borrow him if you like, but return him to this man when you're done."

Eyes still closed, he waved his finger until it hit roughly the right trajectory of Vexen's glide. Vexen had, upon sight of Axel's body, circled back in.

He took the albino with one hand, lowering Saix's fingers with the other.

"I'll take care of the troglodyte." He crooned, tapping the corpse on the hollowed, charred chasm of the nose sweetly. To the albino, he wondered, "How did he wind up in such a condition?"

The albino gave no indication of even attempting to alter the lines of his face.

"Uh. It was like this."

_Halibel wasn't in a decent mood, so having the Sonic the Hedgehog boy slither up from nowhere and erupt from underneath her cleavage was probably enough to castrate him as it was. _

_She hesitated only because he had tattoos, and his eyes were glowing faintly, and she didn't want to do any extra paperwork because she chose to end its trivial existence. _

_It was even slightly adorable, if you discounted where it had last planted its face. _

"_Hello." She offered, giving it far too much leeway and too much of a grace period, she reasoned, just half a second later._

"_Why, helloo thar." It replied back, examining her up and down. "Would you like to dingo in my frisky?"_

"_I have no idea what you just said, but you die."_

"That was…a very high quality flashback." Saix replied thinly, pinching his forehead. Vexen, eyes agog, nodded in agreement.

From where they stood, several meters along the nearly endless hall that led to the corridor that led to the conference hall, Xemnas turned to the blind aide beside him.

"So, who is that?" The aide flashed him a look, and then processed the tone. Only one person among even arrancar could generate that sort of tone.

"Ah…Gin."

"He's our…public relations officer and vice president." The aide described diplomatically. He jabbed a hand toward Xemnas, the sudden movement of which made him jump. "Kaname Tosen. I'm the head of HR."

"Oh, how convenient." Xemnas announced, voice oozing smarmily as he lunged for Xaldin's sleeve and pulled him near. Or strained himself trying, at least. "This is our HR Director Xaldin. He doesn't have a last name. To cut our old ties to humanity."

"I'm sure you'll have much to discuss." He added, hand relaxing as Xaldin moved in and shook Tosen's hand.

"The only thing I'm interested in right now is discussing your insurance policies." Tosen told Xemnas coldly.

"Ah," Xemnas' face adopted a compromise of his typical facial freeze of confusion and the soul-crushing dissipation of hope that was worn by Las Noches Ltd.'s unseen faces of employment.

"Well, let's do that."

"Yeah…" Aizen droned, ambling along several paces ahead of them. "To my office. We'll discuss your…policy."

Xemnas and Larxene burst forward eagerly. Aizen held up his hand.

"I only need your…R and D guy…and your HR Director…"

…Souls of a Sister Start-Up…

The tie was slung back over her narrow shoulder, the first two buttons of her shirt undone, revealing the slender warp of her porcelain neck.

"God." Larxene exclaimed, stretching her arms above her back. She brought her hands back down to her face, sucking on a freshly lit cigarette. "I haven't had a good smoke in forever. Vexen and his stupid rules about smoking."

She blew out air happily. Beside her, Xigbar flicked the ash off of his cigarette with his middle finger. He rolled it around between his fingers thoughtfully.

"I know what I'd like to be smoking right now." He announced to the collective at large.

"A pile of corpses?" Saix, the non-smoker, inquired in monotone nastiness. Having a bird's eye view of Larxene's cleavage and an eye watering from tobacco fume was making him moody.

Xigbar looked into the vacuous dark of the sky above them, puffing on his cigarette irritably.

"No, man. I need a blunt. I need about seven shots of some Bacardi gold and one blunt the size of an elephant's tonk."

Xigbar measured the length of his ideal blunt with two fingers. Saix kept meaningfully silent.

Larxene, light eyes agog, almost swallowed her cigarette.

"Are you…" She fought her sanity for the words; sanity was putting up one hell of a fight on behalf of self-preservation. Her eyebrows pinched, another trait she shared in common with Demyx and Axel.

"Sure you're not gay?" She finished at last, desperately, in a tinny voice.

"Or overcompensating." Saix added, clearing the smoke from his face with a hand. Xigbar let one jaundiced eye rove over the two before selecting a target.

"You're one to talk, Mr. Two-handed." He growled at Saix, leaning back against the stairs. "That should be your new nickname. Two hands."

He made a gesture that killed two birds with one stone.

"Quit it!" Larxene shrieked, grimacing as she shielded her eyes. "I don't want to see that!"

"It's so easy to play the straight man with you, isn't it?" Saix inquired dryly. Xigbar threw his hand out, almost spearing Larxene in the process.

"Xaldin told you to say that, didn't he?"

"Hehe." Larxene looked up; Saix's eyes drifed sideways; Xigbar flipped over like a pancake, his eye screwed up in his head.

Eyes daubed with blue paint, at least in seeming, pale hair ruffled by fingers and wind and the good chance of never having seen a comb, the man in white turned his head on its side and grinned with as much wanton, sinful destructiveness as an angel wandering the desolations of hell.

"I don't know who you are, but that's a pretty lively conversation you're having." Submitted the man in white, spinning a set of car keys (on which was an orange, glittery gel tamagochi in humanoid form) around his index finger idly. A straw-colored head bumped against the key ring, bringing it to a halt. A slavering face gawped happily and a moaning giggle escaped from the mouth.

The man in white grabbed the straw-colored, hairy melon and shoved it forward for better viewing capacity.

"This is our babbling psychopath; Wonderweiss." He told them.

"Yeah, we have one of those." Xigbar told him tautly, gripping the steps. "His name's Axel."

The man in white moved forward. There was a fist-sized hole in his stomach, leading to nothing. It seemed wise not to comment upon it, as it would have led to an overlong explanation and the trio were on a random but much-needed break, of all things.

The one called Wonderweiss sidled up to Saix, and began to drool affectionately in his hair.

"Yeah, he does shit like that, too." Larxene mentioned, indicating Wonderweiss with her cigarette. "Only it's because he's a dick, not because he's a…"

She waved her hands a little. Saix lightly pushed Wonderweiss down the steps. Wonderweiss squawked, squealed, and then took the stairs three at a time when he finally stopped rolling.

"I don't know." The man in white admitted.

"Well, he appears to be profoundly retarded." Saix sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. Wonderweiss had lunged at him, hands clinging to Saix's knees. He pealed with laughter and tried to push his head into Saix's armpit.

"Maybe." The man in white shrugged a single shoulder, taking the steps at a leisurely pace. "He's officially our janitor."

"What do you know? So's ours." Xigbar cut in brightly, nastily.

The man in white pointed his keys. A car in the white dunes, delineated as a parking space by orange crime scene tape, lit up. The car was silver, half-covered by the sands of the desert in which the shadows walked.

"You drive a Honda Civic?" Xigbar puffed incredulously. "That's not what I'd imagine you driving."

The man in white stuck his hands in his pockets and preened.

"See me in a sports car, huh?" He looked at his slender compact workman's car, his eloquent gaze summarizing his sentiments toward it. "Yeah, I'd prefer a jaguar…"

Larxene shrugged indifferently, moving over as Xigbar's hand nearly collided with her hip. He gave the steps a friendly pound.

"Sit here and talk, man." The man in white cocked an eyebrow.

Larxene sighed, pushing across the crystal step. "We have plenty of room. The seat's even warm." She straightened her tie self-conscientiously.

The man in white shrugged, taking the proffered seat. His long legs stretched across several steps.

The petite girl passed him a lighter and a cigarette. His lip kinked appreciatively.

Behind him, to his irritation, Wonderweiss giggled and groaned, a heavy fabric writhed, and a snort that didn't originate in Wonderweiss recalled him from the relaxation he was just beginning to accept as possible.

A tall, golden-skinned, blue-haired man resembling a vulcan hobbled down the steps, planting himself squarely before Grimmjow. Wonderweiss was slobbering, teeth embedded in the fabric of the man's robe.

He trained an accusatory stare down the row of eyes; from the petite blonde to Grimmjow to the scarred, friendly-seeming cyclops.

"…Anyone have a muzzle for this kid?"

…Muzzles Don't Grow On Trees, You Know…

"Well…" Aizen rambled, at a pace that would have had Henry Kissinger screaming at his fullest lung capacity in impatient rage. He examined the papers before him, all highlighter-neon shaded triplicate sheets. Tosen may well have been the manager as well as the HR Director, given eye-watering brilliance of the pages and illegibility of the templates. "Yes…you all seem like qualified…individuals…"

"It's just that the…coverage you asked for…It's just so…a little…vague…"

"Well…" Said Aizen, bringing his hands together like a yogi offering namaste.

"Here is the rub."

"I'm all ears." Xemnas told him, giggling bemusedly. Aizen might as well have looked at him through a fishbowl.

"Yeah…You…qualify…in some of the…fields of criteria…for…

"We have a quota, here…and you don't have enough employees for coverage."

Xemnas' hand twitched, then outright jerked. (It alerted Vexen, wholly ignored in the corner, that something was happening in the meeting, and he could stop dozing. The titular 'Mad Researcher' looked up expectantly.)

"I have thousands, probably millions, of nobodies at my and my subordinates' command…" He began achingly, eyes closed against the tidal wave of migraine pushing across the beaches of his grasp of formal conduct.

"Well you see…" Aizen broke in. "That's the thing. Without names…social security…numbers…and areas of residence… I can't consider those people…employees. I mean…they don't even have a pay scale?"

"They're mindless slaves." Xemnas protested; Aizen broke him off with his hand.

"There's the problem…there." Aizen drew in a long, painfully long draught of breath. "We as a company have hundreds of drones, but they aren't mindless, per se. Our minions excel at what is known as 'employment'."

"Animal training doesn't count." Summarized Tosen, mercifully putting an end to it. (I could go gay for you, Xemnas thought, you Stevie Wonder braids-wearing Geordie LaForge wannabe.)

"So." Xaldin wondered, rising to the occasion; elbows on the table, fingers pressed against his nostrils. "What do we need to do to get coverage?"

He was covertly jiggling his leg on the leg of his chair.

"You're going to need to hire at least a thousand more employees." Tosen rambled, examining a clipboard that seemed irrelevant that he kept tilted toward him and away from them. "We recommend hiring agencies like the Guild of Calamitous Intent. You may also want to advertise around companies with a high turnover rate, like the Sinestro Corps and Cadmus Labs."

"Shinra Electric Power Company is also a good…pool…for candidates…" Aizen added conversationally. As a man, the nobodies winced, each in their own definitive way.

"Isn't that the company where the majority of the workforce have gone mad, insane, or have died?" Vexen inquired, after straining Aizen's words from Aizen's voice.

"Yeah…high turnover rates…"

"I see."

"That's about it." Tosen summarized, flipping the pages of his clipboard back to front. "Until we see more people on the payroll we can't allow you to enroll in our coverage program."

…Clone Accounts…

"Honestly; what was that?" Xemnas shrilled, waving his hands in the air theatrically. "I…drone on for…what seems like…eternity…so that your mind melts away…like Ang Lee's career…the pacing is like…the first Hulk movie…" He cupped his face in his hand, smoothing down the lines of his cheek, trying to breathe out of his compressed nostrils.

"Well, ordinarily with clone legions, you can afford a little laxity." Vexen offered. Xemnas regarded him over his hand.

"No clones." Xemnas spat. "No clones ever."

Vexen followed on Xemnas' heels doggedly, like a small terrier following an eighty-year-old man's car on a Sunday drive.

"Oh, come on." He pleaded, hands cupped together like Shirley Temple. "They're not that bad. Clone enough of them and eventually you can't tell them apart."

"They turn on you." Xemnas said darkly, glancing at him from the corner of one golden eye. "All clones turn on you. It's just their nature."

"That's preposterous. My clones have never turned on me." Vexen crossed his arms tightly against his chest.

"How would we know?" Xemnas countered. He peered at Vexen, sincerely suspiciously.

Vexen laughed at the scrutiny, and laughed at the supposition while he was at it.

"Because." He said musically, inspecting his fingernails. "Unlike some, I'm not daft enough to leave a weapon out for them when I enter my duplicator."

Xaldin coughed, readjusting his reading glasses. Xemnas twisted away from Vexen on his heel, pressing forward.

"With clones, the genetic material's the same." Vexen continued eagerly. "You get pretty good medical that way."

"The end result is a complete waste of time. Let's just collect the group and go home."

"How about trying a labor union? Or forming one, to get the benefits?" Xaldin inquired. He felt it was due time to join the conversation.

Xemnas shot him a look more cynical than the one he attempted to lower Vexen with.

"Unions are the business equivalent of a leech; they do nothing but suck the blood out of a corporation."

"Well, maybe we should try his hiring policy." Xaldin persisted, attempting reason. "We could get them insured through the guild and tell this stuffy ass bastard to shove it."

"Or we would, if the guild didn't have discrimination laws." Xemnas countered.

"Anti-discrimination laws?"

"Nope. Discrimination laws." He sighed, turning to Xaldin and giving him a look that suggested that yes, he wasn't a total idiot, and yes, he'd attempted this hiring procedure before. "Anyone dead is denied coverage. Apparently undead warriors have an edge or something over a living applicant."

Xemnas turned around meaningfully, and pivoted around again, shaking his fist.

"I'm still saying clones." Vexen submitted. Xemnas nearly chewed off his bottom lip in fury before lunging and throwing his fist in Vexen's direction.

"Enough with the clones! We're not giving your pals on Kamino any business!" He pounded his fist for emphasis and shook his head.

"Those FUCKING things? They CREEP me the HELL OUT!" He spun around furiously and took the hall at a breakneck pace.

Xaldin gave Vexen a commiserative pat on the shoulder. Vexen nodded, patting Xaldin's shoulder in turn in a mirror of the gesture. Xaldin's brow creased as Vexen started to drift down the hall after Xemnas, still patting Xaldin's shoulder.

"Better yet," He unaffixed his hand (there was truly no better way to describe the motion) from Xaldin's shoulder, cupping both hands around his mouth. "Xemnas; may a mention a friend? He can get a deal on a cyborg army."

Xemnas came to a sudden halt.

"Are. They." Xemnas held his breath, an eyeball twitching. "Clones?"

"Actually, no. Enhanced by confusing magi technical armor; yes. But otherwise cloned? Oh no. They're individuals."

Xemnas pointed down the hall to Xaldin.

"Does their insurance policy have anything against cyborg magicians?" He inquired at a yell.

"Not in print." Xaldin called back. He consulted his handbook of Las Noches policy, skimming the pages at a blur. He smiled, holding the book up.

"Better. They have a premium package for that kind of crap!"

Xemnas strode, boots clicking against the crystal floors.

"What are their rates?" He asked, breathless. Xaldin pushed his reading glasses back onto his nose smugly.

"Lower than the policy we were going for."

Xemnas not only ate the canary, but an entire bird sanctuary, considering his look. He clapped his hands together mirthfully.

"Excellent." He made a strange underhanded motion with his arm, giving the air the middle finger. "We'll stick it to that bespectacled bastard."

A man impassioned by thrift, Xemnas clenched both fists, and assumed a pose, a la Che Guevara.

"You call your friend and get me those party clowns, Vexen." He said, perhaps heroically.

Vexen cocked an eyebrow, and started to giggle nervously, the violence of the laughter rocking his waif-like frame and tousling his hair.

"Hehe…what?"

Xaldin leaned over his shoulder and breathed out.

"It was an ill-conceived joke." He murmured in sotto. "Just laugh, but don't laugh hard enough to encourage it."

Xemnas laughed merrily to himself, doing something that resembled the peppermint twist. He held the premium package page open with an index finger.

"Xaldin; attend to the others. Go find Axel first, please. They're not keeping any of my bagatelle."

Xaldin scratched nervously at the peach fuzz on his cheek.

"_Uh…we're going to need that back." Xaldin told Gin, who smiled at him, and went back to pushing Axel's body across the floor with a long-handled broom. _

"_We were getting acquainted." Gin pouted. Axel's body, well acquainted with a broom, spun mutilated arm over mutilated arm. _

_Xaldin stood there, and counted down from one hundred. Gin had made it halfway across the room, possibly entering a world record for slowest sweeping accomplished by a physically fit undead. _

"_Oh, I see. Leaving so soon?" His egg-shaped faced fell upon Xaldin, to which Xaldin felt the urge to slice his skin off with an apple peeler. _

"_Aizen must have given you one of his speeches about an unnecessary staffing." Gin said, unnecessarily. It proved that the torture Aizen perpetrated had been committed on-purpose, at any rate. _

_Xaldin shrugged; and backed into the wall when he was given an unwanted dose of Gin invading his personal space._

"_A key tactic you should always use in HR is limb-cutting. It lets them know where you stand." Gin used the long-handled broom to push Axel to Xaldin's feet. _

_Gin grinned his delightful grin, matching Axel's deceased, mutilated grin. Xaldin tried to push the vomit back down his throat, stooped to one trouser-covered knee to lift the body, perhaps as a shield. _

"_I'll…remember that." He told Gin. "Your face will probably come to mind."_

_…The Company's Motto Is Darkness Eternal…_

_The menagerie of sounds of laughter at various octaves assailed the ears of Xaldin, Xemnas, and Vexen, as well as the dead, somewhat still intact ears of Axel, who was in Vexen's arms._

_Vexen was holding him like the stuffed gorilla won at the fair, a grin of achievement on his face._

"_Oh, God, YES!" Xigbar screamed. He was standing at a lunge, hovering over four steps. "ALWAYS AT FIVE IN THE FUCKING--"_

"_Ahem." Xemnas coughed, albeit icily, suspecting that it was something regarding him. "We're leaving?"_

_Xigbar crumpled slowly, like a balloon deflating. Larxene tossed her cigarette down the stairs._

"_Well," Xigbar threw out a hand to the blue-haired Las Noches employee that had been sitting with them. "We'll catch you later, Grimmjow."_

"_Yeah, yeah." The man fished for his car keys, ducked his head and put his hand out to Larxene. "Nice meeting you guys."_

_She took his hand, giving it a sportsmanly shake. He took Xigbar's hand, shook it, and rose._

_His blue-limned eyes fell on Xemnas as he stood.._

"_Hey is that Ma…" _

"_Yeah, yeah." Larxene cut in quickly. "That's him._

_The blue-haired Las Noches employee smiled, nodded several times to himself, and started to descend the stairs._

_He continued nodding. Larxene and Xigbar held their breaths, although as to why it couldn't be ascertained._

_He passed Saix at the base of the stairs, who was using his claymore to shovel dust into a small divot. _

"_He's a nice guy." Larxene stated reassuringly, although who she was reassuring wasn't exactly obvious to the other organization members._

"_Yeah. A nice guy." Xigbar repeated._

"_I'll bet he was." Vexen added, feeling abandoned by the wend of the conversation. _

_The blue-haired employee moved across the concourse, weaving through the orange tape. He came at last to his car._

_The door opened with a dull snap. He adjusted his driver's side mirror, and got in. _

"_Haha! MANSEX! AHAHA!!" He pulled the door closed behind him. _

_There was a prevailing silence as the car's lights lit up, the car pulled out of its parking space, and drove off into the desert horizon._

_Xigbar tried to whistle, but the cigarette had dried his mouth. Larxene placed her head in her lap, shaking it woefully._

_Saix continued to tamp down dirt. Xaldin grimaced, jaw to the side like a typewriter. _

_A cool wind blew across the desert, scattering sand in fractals. _

"…_Did he just mouth what I think he mouthed?" Xemnas asked._

_…You Left The Water Boiling…_

_There was macaroni all over the anteroom. It covered the bodies in a cold, translucent orange-yellow gel._

"_Hunh. I thought we forgot something." Xemnas said._

_…And They Went There, Again…_

_The room was stuffy, stuffy and dark. Thus it was meant to hold the subject for ten thousand years. _

"_Hwuh? Hunh? Hunh?" A light, offering escape from the sarcophagus, and eternal repose._

_Escape offered a view of the most hideous and paper white of foul compositions of the human face. _

"_Omigod! Jackal people have captured mee!" Hollered the subject, pushing his hands and feet out violently. "Must escape! Must escape!"_

_The wretched face had a stick-thin arm, by which it gripped the subject, now squirming, by the waist._

"_Hey, keep it down…" Moved the tiles in the wretched face's mouth, what some would consider teeth. It held the subject up for closer inspection. "Hey, what the Hell?"_

"_Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh!!" Screamed the subject, now apparently the doomed one. "Jaaaaaackaaaaal Peeeeeople!!"_

"_What is that fucking racket? I can't concentrate." A shadow fell across the floor beside the wretched face._

"_This damned copier. It doesn't work." The shadow added, shaking the shadow of a cube. It came closer, demonic green eyes level with the upside-down face of the doomed one. It too was paper white, but it had a visible protrusion coming off its head that wasn't obscured by a kicking foot or a bit of cloak. _

"_Noooooo!! Saaaaataaaaan!!" The doomed one screamed._

"_What?" The demonic one turned to the wretched face curiously. "What is he talking about?"_

_The wretched face shrugged. The doomed one, doomed, continued to scream and flail about like a fish. _

"_Listen, you racist little bastard--just because I am foreign does not automatically make me the Devil." Said the demonic one, raising a finger angrily. _

_He turned once more to the wretched face._

"_We should do you bodily harm."_

"_Jaaaaaaaaackaaaaal!!" The doomed one wailed._

"_Eh. Yep." Agreed the wretched face, face well and thankfully out of view. The wretched face loosed his grip on the doomed one, rolled his shoulders._

"_Alrighty. Time to kick your…"A familiar cough cut him off._

"_Ahem." The wretched face and the demonic one turned aside, introducing to this theatre of horror the esoteric blond one, who was at the moment a bit apologetic._

"_Sorry." He told them, pointing to the doomed one. "We left that here." _

_He revolved a wrist, blinking furiously, did the esoteric blond one. _

"_It's…experimental technology."_

"_It fucken yelled in my face." Spoke the wretched one, determined to exact retribution from the doomed one. _

"_It's not smart enough to kill. You don't want to kill it." Explained the esoteric blond one. "Because…It watches marathons of Stargate."_

"_I dunno." The wretched face begged to differ, thought the wretched face did not announce so that openly. "That Samantha Carter is hot."_

_The esoteric blond one looked upon the wretched face and thus challenged this disputed upside with a dismissive laugh._

"_Whatever floats your boat, weirdo." The esoteric blond one said to the wretched face, binding his ka to his lowly argument. _

"_And you forgot to mention; their theme song kicks ass." The wretched face continued, employing strategies gained from water cooler conversation that the esoteric blond one would have found esoteric. _

"_Yeah." The demonic one allied himself with the wretched face after considerably long neutrality. "It did kind of begin to suck though." He promptly equivocated._

"_Oh, it did." Said the esoteric blond one, motioning to the doomed one, who was now redeemed. "It began to suck mightily." _

_The doomed one fled as the redeemed one, through a portal that the esoteric blond one had made. _

"_Like a tunnel through inter-dimensional space." Ulquiorra agreed with a painful nod._

"_I'd take offense, but it really sort of did." Nnoitra admitted, also striving to look pained, against the naturally pained look on his face._

"_Who are we talking to, again?" He added, noting the air that filled the hall that went unoccupied. _

"_I don't know, for he left." Ulquiorra shrugged, casting a look of hatred on the hyogoku in his hands._

"_Heh." Nnoitra placed his hand inside his jacket, looking down impishly at his comrade. "Ulquiorra."_

"_Yes?"_

"_Look what I stole off of Yammy's desk."_

_He removed his hand from his jacket, holding in plain sight a machine of clear blue plastic and chromed steel. There was a ribbed rubber base to it. _

_Nnoitra snapped it together twice._

"_Oh, that's terrible." Ulquiorra drawled out his words sarcastically. "You should give it back."_

"_Eh. Fuck him." Nnoitra shrugged. "Let's go burn it."_

_Nnoitra proceeded down the hall. He barely managed three paces before Ulquiorra placed his hand on his arm, catching him._

"_Grimmjow wants us and Szayel to go over to his house. Apparently he has a plan or something."_

"_Plan?" This was the first Nnoitra heard of it. He tossed his head at Ulquiorra, expression quizzical. _

_Ulquiorra shrugged, uncertain. _

"_I don't know. He says it is very 'kickass'." He shrugged again. "Since Grimmjow is kickass, we must assume his plan is pretty kickass, too, and doesn't have any loopholes we never considered, ever."_

"_That sounds about right." Nnoitra responded. He laughed then, low and stuttering._

"_Loopholes. Hehe."_

_End Chapter Four_


End file.
